Cupidity's Stupidity

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels provide an unparalleled insight into the breed of rich Americans who lived their young-adulthoods during post-WWI.   The main characters of his books encounter these pompous aristocrats with often devastating ramifications.   Nick Caraway of The Great Gatsby witnesses his wealthy cousin, Daisy, and her husband, Tom, mar the lives of many members of a lower social class:   “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money […] and let other people clean up the mess they had made” (Fitzgerald 187-188).   The wealthy people of the Jazz Age led purposeless lives and collided with others simply to relieve their boredom.   Fitzgerald accurately delineates the emotional decay of the aristocrats during the tumultuous years proceeding WWI.   In four of his novels, Fitzgerald employs a rich array of writing devices which serve to develop an overlapping theme of wealth in the early nineteen hundreds.   Fitzgerald utilizes such literary elements as point of view, dialogue, and title in his novels This Side of Paradise, The Love of the Last Tycoon, Tender is the Night, and The Great Gatsby in order to convey his belief that avarice for money causes the wealthy to lose their moral values.

Fitzgerald utilizes many different points of view in his writings in order to help develop his theme of moral corruption associated with wealth.   Two prominent examples of this occur in Fitzgerald’s novels Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby.   The former consists entirely of a third person-limited view but follows three different characters at different points in the novel.   Rosemary Hoyt and Dick Diver supply the first two views while Nicole Diver provides the last.   Nicole represents the corrupt aristocrat who descends from a rich family.   The beginning of the section limited to Dick’s views and all of the section limited to Rosemary’s views present a pleasant outward appearance to the...