What Does Greed Mean In The Great Gatsby

Gatsby Lens Paper
The Great Gatsby takes place in the 1920’s, a time of extravagant wealth for the few, generated at the expense of the many. At this time, working men and women toiled their lives away in factories and mines run by companies who gave no care to their health, safety or material conditions. These workers lost the protection and representation provided by unions which were systematically suppressed and often cracked down upon by the forces of the state and the goons of capitalist interests alike. Reckless investors and corporations gambled with the capital generated by their labor, and the fate of the American economy, in the irresponsible and unregulated casino of Wall Street. This racket of influence, power, and profit churned

out massive sums of wealth, which these investors and executives, made insecure by its novelty, flaunted with ostentatious displays and parties, lodging themselves in a reality tragically distant from that of those whose labor enabled their prosperity. The Social Power Lens allows us to analyze dynamics of class, power, and wealth such as these. Viewing The Great Gatsby through this lens shows that the characters, events, and locations of the novel represent the ills of the growing wealth inequality and soulless greed of the 1920’s.
The valley of ashes represents everyone and everything that has been sacrificed in the blind pursuit of wealth. The “gray land and spasms of bleak dust” are seen as inconsequential side-effects of prosperity by those who benefit from it ( Fitzgerald 23 ). The “ash-gray men… who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air”have no such luxury, they live in this desolation and their lungs are filled with that ash and dust ( Fitzgerald 23 ). They are casualties of a system in which “One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer. The rich get richer…” and the poor not only “get- children” but are also forced to sacrifice their lives and wellbeings to guarantee the other surety ( Fitzgerald 95 ). It’s no wonder that Myrtle uses her affair with Tom to escape the life to which she has been condemned. The access to wealth that her relationship to Tom gives her allows Myrtle to play out the power fantasies that the suffering, poverty, and oppression amongst which she lives has instilled in her, even driving her to exclaim “These people! You have to keep after them all the time.” in reference to members of her own class ( Fitzgerald 32 ). This scenario demonstrates the corrupting influence of wealth and power on people and explains how it is so easy for the wealthy to ignore the plight of the valley of ashes and its people. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg then, represent the view of a sympathetic observer, they are eyes of pity and compassion for the valley and its inhabitants and eyes of judgement and reckoning towards those who reap great riches from its plight, and the chaos their hegemony has fostered.
The supremely selfish actions of the novel’s major characters demonstrate the soullessness that greed has instilled in their society.

Gatsby throws nearly constant, extravagant parties in the pursuit of a superfluous ideal as a sort of way to give his life meaning after having achieved his goal of self enrichment. These parties are massively expensive, wasteful, and irresponsible, they each probably cost more than a worker in the valley of ashes makes in their entire life but Gatsby doesn’t care because he is the only person that matters to himself. Even his “love” for Daisy is tied up in a self-mythologized and egotistical vision of himself. When he took control of the car after Daisy hit Myrtle he did not stop the car because it would have burdened him and hampered his ambitions. This selfish worldview has been manifest in Gatsby his entire life, he left his family farm because he thought he was too good for it, he dropped out of college because it wasn’t enriching him fast enough, and he turned to crime because it was the quickest and easiest way to achieve the life of wealth and power that he worshipped. Daisy is much the same in this respect. She got back together with Gatsby because she thought he was now financially stable and left him when Tom revealed evidence to the contrary. Daisy is so far removed from responsibility and so immersed in her life of luxury and decadence that she practically ignores the existence of her daughter Pammy, leaving her upbringing to a

nurse, with no regard to the effects of such an upbringing on the child’s development. Tom manifested a similar irresponsible disregard for others when he facilitated Wilson’s murder of Gatsby, seeing it as more a way of tying up two loose ends than as a tragic loss of two lives. A class of the ultra wealthy and powerful who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness” is the logical end result of a society whose ultimate ideal is self-enrichment and which minimizes the effect of one’s actions on others through its fetishization of the self-made man ( Fitzgerald 179 ). The carelessness, greed, and naked ambition demonstrated by these characters is a reflection of the depravity of the society in which they live.
Gatsby’s ultimate failure to fully enter the ranks of the elite class represents the impregnability of their stranglehold on power.

Gatsby is the son of dirt-poor midwestern farmers and after years of unsuccessful attempts to realize his dream of exorbitant wealth through legitimate means he recognized that due to the immense disadvantage at which his class background put him the only way to satisfy his yawning greed was by indulging in crime and corruption. Gatsby also realized that the capitalist class which he intended to join had essentially supplanted the despotic role that the church and nobility had once held in society. These ambitions are clearly alluded to by his palatial mansion, of which Nick says “...I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour. A brewer had built it in the “period” craze a decade before, and there was a story that he’d agreed to pay five years taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw.” ( Fitzgerald 88 ). Nick mentions Immanuel Kant, an Enlightenment philosopher who after staring at a church steeple in the center of his town realized the central role the church played in society and became very critical of the power that it held. Nick also mentions that the builder of the mansion wanted the neighboring cottages to be thatched with straw in order to resemble the dwellings of medieval peasants who were forced to serve their local lords who lived in grand estates which

Gatsby’s mansion is meant to resemble. Despite his blatant ambition, his wealth, and his clear understanding of the class dynamics, Gatsby was unable to break into the upper crust of the elite and was ultimately killed for his efforts because the powerful guard their station jealously. Gatsby was a more useful an example to them as a dead man and a failure than he would have been as the son of a dirt-poor farmer among their number. Gatsby’s story and his failure serve as a reminder of the entrenched power of the wealthy and of the increasing concentration of economic power at the time.
The Social Power Lens allows us to view The Great Gatsby with the interlocking dynamics of economic power, class, and wealth in mind. This perspective leads one to conclude that the locations, characters, and events of The Great Gatsby provide a troubling reflection on the growing concentration of economic power and the prominence of self-centered greed during the 1920’s. This was a time of glamour and extravagance for the rich and selfish few and of increasingly acute suffering for the poor and exploited many. The Great Gatsby serves as a piece of biting social commentary, portraying society’s most glamorous and detestable alongside its most exploited and pitiable in the starkest of terms.