The Great Gatsby is about materialism

The argument

In The Great Gatsby, achieving the American dream actually means becoming wealthy and flaunting your possessions — the dream has been reduced to its material signs. Gatsby himself illustrates the substitution. He becomes wealthy so that he can buy the things that mark out a higher class: a mansion, a car, large quantities of alcohol. The point of acquiring them is not use but display, since what he is trying to purchase is a position rather than the objects themselves. The other characters confirm that this is how the world of the novel works. All of them are interested in material possessions, and the parties are the clearest evidence of it: large numbers of people attended Gatsby's parties without knowing him personally, drawn by how expensive and popular the parties were. Their attendance is directed at the wealth on show rather than at the man supplying it, which is precisely what makes his acquisitions fail at the thing he wanted from them. Myrtle Wilson shows the same logic operating from below. She is the wife of George, a gas station and garage owner in the Valley of Ashes, and she dreams of living an exuberant lifestyle in New York City while trapped in poverty. Her romantic interest in Tom Buchanan follows from his ability to buy her presents — an apartment in the city, new clothing — because she associates owning expensive items with being high class. The attachment is to what he can purchase rather than to him. Read together, these cases describe a single confusion running through the novel. Wealth is not pursued as a means to a life but mistaken for the life itself, and every character who pursues the American dream pursues its possessions instead.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Despite having many nice and expensive items, Jay Gatsby is not a materialist. He wants to stand out in West Egg so that Daisy will notice him, not because he cares about owning a lot of possessions. The items he buys (such as a sports car and mansion) are used as part of his plan. Gatsby also knows Daisy is a materialist and is easily impressed by expensive things.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise reads Gatsby's acquisitions as ends in themselves, while the counter notes they function in the novel as means of being noticed by Daisy — the reading on which the dream, rather than the goods, is the subject. [Rejecting P2] Guests attending without knowing their host, and Myrtle reading Tom's gifts as status, show characters using possessions as markers of class, which supports the sibling positions on wealth and social class at least as well; the premise does not establish that materialism is what makes the novel about the American dream.