Signifigance Of Bad Drivers In The Great Gatsby
Road Rage
The 1920's was an age of extravagancy. The automobile brought great things for the wealthy. They would ornate their cars with gold plated mirrors and expensive furs for the women to place on their laps while they rode. While there was no drivers test anyone who could afford an automobile could drive one. In The Great Gatsby, a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the automobile, a symbol of wealth, serves as an instrument of death and destruction. Many of the characters in The Great Gatsby are horrible drivers literally and figuratively. Jordan Baker decides being a careless driver is necessary as long as the other drivers are cautious. Tom and Daisy Buchanan where described as being careless people, "...the smashed up things and creatures and then they retreated back to 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..." This was an accurate description of the way most wealthy acted in the 1920's as well as most characters in the novel. Jordan Baker, Nick Carraway, and Jay Gatsby were primary examples of the carelessness literally and metaphorically speaking in the novel. Jordan shows the carelessness of the wealthy in the 1920's through her careless actions, Nick shows the theme of bad drivers in the novel through his inability to hinder, and Gatsby shows the theme of bad drivers in the novel through his impossible dream.
The wealthy in the 1920's were constantly neglectful of the way they behaved and when they realized they realized they were wrong they would retreat back to their money. They believed that what they did could never be wrong. They thought of themselves to be superior. Gatsby perceived Jordan to be an honest person but Nick notices she cheats and lies to make things better for herself. He reads in a newspaper article that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semifinal round of a golf...
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