Gatsby

An element of Gatsby’s life which would be interesting to a Marxist critic is the revelation that he began life as the son of ‘shiftless and unsuccessful farm people’ and had been consistently determined to change his economic status. Marxist ideology would not recognize this as an achievement, since this mobility merely reinforces the unfair economic divide between rich and poor as opposed to dismantling the system completely.  Everything Gatsby has gained has been due to the criminal perspective of American culture in the 1930’s brought on largely by Prohibition. Gatsby throwing lavish parties shows that all he really cares about are the women he possesses. When looking at Gatsby, he seems a strange man- we know little about him, only that he is very well off and that he used prohibition to amass those fortunes. Throwing parties that are as extravagant as they are pretentious, Gatsby gains the attention of Daisy with whom he plans to make his. From a Marxist perspective, we can see that Gatsby is using commodities to benefit himself socially more than economically as his fortune speaks for itself. Gatsby’s commodification is probably the most drastic of all the characters in relation to Daisy Buchanan. If we look closer, we can see that Daisy blatantly tells Gatsby that she would like to control him. “I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around” (Fitzgerald 94). -TC