Hedonism and The Great Gatsby Hedonism means to live only for pleasure. It means not thinking about the consequencesof your actions as long as make you happy. It’s a total abandon of all responsibilities. This typeof lifestyle often has negative results. I mean, look at the hippies, and how their hedonisticsociety turned out. They are all either in rehab centers or have kids running around with nameslike “Moonbeam” and “Starchild”. But enough hippie bashing - let’s look at how the Hedonisticway of life is integrated into The Great Gatsby. Let’s take the parties for example. Gatsby has a party just about every week, no matterwhat. He has tons of people come over, and they party all night. Gatsby has tons of booze at hisparties, and no one thinks of consuming anything but alcohol. Everybody is getting drunkeverywhere. And Gatsby gives no thought to cost- at one party he has an entire orchestra playingfor his guests. People come to the party who aren’t invited, yet Gatsby makes no effort to get ridof them (he lets them stay, maybe hoping that they’ll help to let everyone at the party have abetter time.) Another example of hedonism is the house that Gatsby lives in. He lives there alone, yetit’s a huge mansion! He has maids and a butler, but HE LIVES THERE ALONE! True, hemoved there to be close to Daisy, but wouldn’t that be considered an act of hedonism in itself? Moving to a MANSION to get the pleasure of being close to Daisy. I would consider that prettyhedonistic. Gatsby has a huge library for the visual effect it gives, yet no one in an entirelifetime could read all of those books. He also has music rooms in his house. I never readanything at all in this book to suggest that Gatsby was musically inclined. Also, Gatsby’swardrobe has to be the biggest that I have ever heard of. The pile of clothes is described asbeing a ‘heap’. Tha...
