Hedonism

• Characters who portray signs of hedonism: Jay Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, Daisy Buchanan, Myrtle Wilson
• “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God-a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that-and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty” - Chapter 6
• Chapter 6: Fitzgerald uses the metaphor "He was a son of god".  It should be noted that Gatsby is "a son of God," however, not the God of divine love, but the God of material love- Mammon. Rather than an "inverted Christ" or God, Gatsby is a perverted God; one who is dedicated to the physical rather than the spiritual world. Gatsby has come to adopt the gospel of the American Dream. His existence is founded on a lie, a delusion, and he terms this monstrous lie “God's truth” in relation to Nick and his past.
• "After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe-Paris, Venice, Rome,-collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago” - He is Mammon (wealth regarded as an evil influence or false object of worship and devotion) resurrected by the hedonism (pursuit of pleasure) of the 1920s.
• Fitzgerald introduces a supporting image for the Mammonism of Gatsby in the description of his house which serves, among other things, as the temple of his Philistinism (Someone who deprecates the arts: Philosophy, literature art etc) “The one house on my right was a colossal affair by any standard - it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion (p. 5)
• This description has overtones of Babel (confused noises - early 16th century: from Babel - Tower of Babel - where, according to the biblical story, God made the builders all speak different languages.) with its tower when viewed in the content that it is inhabited by people "who never knew each other's names" (p. 40). Also, "confused and intriguing sounds" emanate from it during Gatsby's parties (p. 51). Fitzgerald has Nick describe one such party as a "bizarre and tumultuous scene" terminating in a "harsh, discordant din of violent confusion" (p.54).
• " According to Genesis, the Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city and a tower “with its top in the heavens.” God disrupted the work by so confusing the language of the workers that they could no longer understand one another. The city was never completed, and the people were dispersed over the face of the earth." The same way Gatsby's dream is never fulfilled. The story serves as a reminder that true spiritual elevation comes from being closer to God.
• The beauty of this image of Gatsby's house is that it is a dual one. It seems that Fitzgerald has created a twentieth-century replica-"a factual imitation"-of Milton's Pandemonium (The place of all demons) . The image is further solidified in that Mammon was its chief architect and builder. The lights that decorate the mansion, the expensiveness

  of its appointments, the opulence of its library, all contribute to this image.
• Fitzgerald appears deliberately to contribute to the God-like image of Gatsby by withholding him from the novel, while surrounding him with an aura of myth. Some believe him to have

  been a double spy during the war, others that he once killed a man, while some see him as a criminal lord of the underworld, dealing in bootleg liquor, among other things.
• Our first sight of Gatsby comes late one night when Nick sees him emerge from the shadows of his mansion. Nick conjectures that Gatsby's appearance gave the suggestion that he had "come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens" (p. 21). Gatsby's arm is stretched seaward, and Nick sights along it to the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock. When Nick looks back to Gatsby, he has disappeared. Gatbsy has come and gone  as an apparition, leaving Nick “alone in the unquiet darkness” (p.22)
•  Nick, in reflecting back on Gatsby's legacy, states: "it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men" (p. 2). The valley of ashes is the result of Jay Gatsby's testament, the dust of a corrupted and perverted American dream; and like its biblical counterpart: "The Valley of Hannon" stripped of it's fertility after workers worshipped the false god, Mammon, incarnate in his son, Gatsby.
• A contributing factor in this assessment of the role of Gatsby is provided by Meyer Wolfsheim, president of "The Swastika Holding Company" and the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. It is an often stated premise that it takes evil to recognize evil. We have

  just such an instance here. Wolfsheim claims to have "made" Gatsby, and refers to him as a "man of fine breeding" (p. 72). This is quite an indictment (claim) coming from a man who wears cuff links from the "finest specimens of human molars" (p. 73)
• Gatsby also has a perverted or mistaken sense of what constitutes character. He refers to Meyer Wolfsheim as a “smart man” and also lauds Jordan Baker as a woman who “wouldn’t do anything that wasn’t right” (p.72)
• Gatsby's gospel of hedonism is reflected in his house, wild parties, clothing, roadster, and particularly in his blatant wooing of another man's wife.
• The chauffeur hears the shots, fired by an "ashen fantastic figure," and Gatsby lies dead, a victim of his own absurd aspirations. Wilson is one of those "ash-gray men" who inhabit the valley of ashes. He is a product of that "foul dust" that gathers in the wake of Gatsby's perverted dream. The crucifixion imagery is perhaps too unmistakable here; it casts Gatsby in the role of a rejected messianic figure through its Biblical allusion. He had been sent from the gods above, "delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor," only to fail in his mission (p.79)
• Jay Gatsby's eulogy is spoken by Owl Eyes-"The poor son-of-a-bitch." Gatsby was the bastard of a hedonistic age, spawned by it and killed by it. Nick, at one point, surmised: "his imagination had never really accepted… his parents at all
•  As a prophet of the American dream, Gatsby fails-miserably-a victim of his own warped idealism and false set of values. The American dream is not to be a reality, in that it no longer exists, except in the minds of men like Gatsby, whom it destroys in their espousal (embrace) and relentless pursuit of it. The American dream is, in reality, a nightmare.