Take your own advice, Fitzgerald.

It is said that Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels are based off of his own life. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby and Nick are representations of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Daisy is Zelda. Daisy is portrayed as a corrupt, careless girl fixated on wealth and extravagance, even “her voice is full of money” (Fitzgerald 120). She has been Gatsby’s dream since the day they met. He was a soldier and she was the Southern belle, but she would not marry him until he became rich and famous. So Gatsby set off to earn Daisy’s love at any cost, becoming corrupt and materialistic in the process.

Fitzgerald must have been extremely insightful in order to recognize all of the problems in his life and admit it, too; however, he must have also been corrupt, just like the characters in his novels, in order to continue living with it. He criticizes society’s thirst for wealth and the immorality that resulted, but he himself participated in this as well. Zelda was his dream, and, like Gatsby, Fitzgerald strove to attain wealth in order to achieve this dream. He satirizes the silliness of drunken men, but he, too, was a drunken man. He criticizes Daisy and Tom’s need to cheat on each other and shows both affairs ending in death. He even foresees that the moral decay will be punished. But even though Fitzgerald saw and understood the rampant corruption of the 1920s at a time when others were merely reveling in it, he did not attempt to separate himself from it either.