The Corruption in Humanity

The characters of The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, are distinguished by a group of Americans in the 1920’s: the rich hedonists of the Jazz Age. A group of rich white people, who a lot come from old money, a corrupted group with superficial affluenza. But who is to say that those characters are bad when those characters are as corrupt as any other human? It’s normal human behavior to act like they do in the book, to lie to get our way, to hope for things that are never going to come, it’s normal for us because, like them, we’re human. People do all of this without realizing it, then they criticize others over the same things because they don’t like that about themselves. It is a foolish thing to believe that everyone is good and innocent when nobody is. Nick Carraway, the protagonist of the novel, is a character who mostly watches. He observes and lets things happen. If he wasn’t the narrator of the story he would be a much less significant character, is standing by and doing nothing really such a bad thing? He observes Jay Gatsby more than anyone else. Gatsby is seen as an exception to everyone else by the main character, as somebody who is beautiful, and even if his death was a tragic one, he’s still as corrupt as all the others, so why was he so different for Nick? 

The character’s behavior makes us believe that they are bad people: they lie to get their way and what they want, they use others to feel better about themselves, and it would look like they only care about themselves. Why is this looked as a bad thing when we have all done the same things as the characters? We’ve all lied and been selfish, so what’s wrong with that if it gets you what you want? The characters are as corrupt as everybody else, Nick points it out in the book, too: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy– they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” (Fitzgerald 109). Nick is the one who said this, but Nick doesn’t realize that he often acts the same way as Daisy and Tom. Even if most don’t have the amount of wealth the characters had, we still act like them on a lot of occasions. Some have more advantages than others but, at the end of the day, humans will act like humans. Fitzgerald portrays the nature of humanity through his characters and story; everyone is corrupt to one extent or the other. The rich ones are corrupt because of their money and the poor ones are corrupt by the lack of it and the desperation that being without money brings. The morality of the characters is the same as ours, the same one we were taught, and the same one we created. A morality that only goes so far because no one is truly good or sinless. A morality that nobody can or want to change.

Standing by and doing nothing could be considered one of Nick’s biggest flaws. Still, one of the biggest themes in the book is about the idea of observing, we have multiple examples for this like Nick, Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, and the owl-eyed man. Two out of the three only appear a few times in the novel, but they’re always watching and catching details that nobody else has seen. Nick is the bystander of his own story, he sits and watches without doing anything to change it, complaining about the ones around him when he is just the same. Dr. Eckleburg are a pair of eyes on an old billboard that see everything, eyes that are constantly observing and judging what’s down below, like a god or an entity. And the owl-eyed man is the first character that saw through Gatsby’s facade: “‘See!’ he cried triumphantly, ‘It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too– didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?’” (Fitzgerald 32). A drunk man in a fake library realized what everyone else could not: that Gatsby’s a fake. He appears next in James Gatz funeral, even if he didn’t know him and Gatsby didn’t know him, he shows up to show his respect for Gatsby. Unlike everyone else, this man saw Jay Gatsby as a real complex person, even if he discovered his farce. The importance of perceiving is what this character embodies. Readers disapprove of Nick when he does the same, but was there truly anything he could have done to change the results of everyone else’s actions? Myrtle wouldn’t have listened to him and she would’ve died anyway, her death leads to Gatsby’s and Wilsons death. It’s the same result. He is a side character in his own story.

The main character of the events is Jay Gatsby, he is also the character readers know nothing about until the end, because he lies to put up a facade, he fools everyone except himself. All humans want more than what they can have and Jay Gatsby is a great example of hoping for an impossible dream. So why was he so great in Nick’s eyes? Why do readers feel bad when he dies? His character is tragic and it shows us that even the ones who appear to have the most are the ones who have the least. Gatsby has everything in terms of money and status, but in reality he has no one, no friends, or lover, or somebody to keep him company. All of this creates sympathy for him, even if he lived as a fool with an impossible dream: “He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream” (Fitzgerald 99). Humans hope for things that they can’t have, and Gatsby, no matter how hard he tried, would never get the past back. He was delusional and hopeful for impossible things, and Nick saw something great about that, about working and hoping for what he wanted until achieving it, but that never happened, it never would have. 

Nick, Jordan, Daisy, Tom, and Gatsby, all of them are corrupt people who don’t see the truth about themselves, all are superficial and lie to keep up their lives how they are. They are like us, fools and liars who, in other people’s eyes, seem so great, they lie and cheat like everyone else. The corruption we criticize them for are the same things we do in our daily lives, it’s how we live to keep up with our surroundings, it’s what we do to survive, and thinking that everyone is pure and innocent is as delusional as Gatsby was for his past.