Negative Portrayal of American Values

Gatsby's intense desire for her makes him undertake come forth acceptance in her circle. But of course his strategies be those of a working class naive close to the expiration surrounded by the shape of elitism and elitism as fundamental human regard: "I think he half expected her to be sick into one of his parties," Jordan Baker tells chip, "but she never did" (Fitzgerald 84).

Gatsby's determinedly comely yet exuberant parties and almost studiously downcast manner with others he perceives to be of high society be phony. Nick Carraway is "old sport," a reflection of Gatsby's ignorant detection of how the elite address one another. Yet Gatsby also has perceptible loneliness for meaningful connection with others and the pathetically false hope, as it turns out, that he can r severally meaningful connection with Daisy. As the action unfolds, Gatsby does effectively duplicate one transpersonal elitist strategy of the elite, which is the slavish use of others. Nick is Gatsby's way to Daisy, once Gatsby knows Nick's family connection. Gatsby, meanwhile, is Daisy's short-term penalize on Tom for his low-class little girlfriend Myrtle. And Gatsby becomes Daisy and Tom's way out of responsibility for Daisy'

s hit-and-run murder of Myrtle. The difference is that the Buchanans use Gatsby to close ranks, with barely a second thought. Gatsby, whose memory and passion are inconsolable, uses Nick in a naive, open-ended way. Indeed, Gatsby is generous to strangers to a fault, the fault cosmos that he fails to recognize how strongly such generosity is an indicator of lower-class (i.e., not Eastern elitist) roots. "There is something funny about a fellow that . . . doesn't want trouble with anybody," says a girl whose torn dress Gatsby replaced, unasked (Fitzgerald 48).

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they unshakable 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 187-8).

For Daisy, the resource is impossible and unfair. She loves, or loved, both Tom and Gatsby, but each for different reasons. in this way Daisy personifies the American habit of ambivalence toward material and emotional priorities. Didion identifies this ambivalence in "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38," citing "the apparently deep gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we get married and the people we love" (72). Didion's point of reference is Howard Hughes, whose inherited wealth and vast corporate successes enabled his eccentric business practices and made them targets of tender critique and a peculiar folk heroism because of the unquestioning value of social power attached to them (well, not kind of absolute, as Hughes's sad, squalid, and solitary last days were to prove).

Unlike Gatsby, Nick does not try to pretend he is something he is, though he is sarcastically smug about his life at West Egg, with "the consoling proximity of millionaires--all for eighty dollars a month" (Fitzgerald 10). Geographically and psychologically, Nick is distantly rel
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