Great Gatsby
...n, her husband, behind and moving toward Tom. A wife’s truest value is to stay committed to her husband, but one can see how Myrtle has abandoned that moral value of a wife, and has taken part in an affair. In addition, this taxi is coated with the color yellow; yellow is associated with Tom and Myrtle’s affair therefore it is no ordinary affair. It has developed into more of an affair that is “coated” with corruption. Thus, Fitzgerald uses the symbolism of the taxi ride to exemplify the decaying of moral values Later in the novel, Jay Gatsby throws extravagant summer parties in which Nick, being a spectator, notices even the smallest details that go into preparing for one of these excessive parties. Nick states, “ Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York- every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves,”(p.43). These oranges and lemons that enter and depart from Gatsby’s house symbolize the party-goers that also go in and out of Gatsby’s house. In the beginning oranges and lemons enter the house of Gatsby full, plump, and filled with juice. As do the party-goers, they come well rounded so to speak, with their upright values of morality. Their polite conversations and their well-behaved manners are what these party-goers are filled with. Nevertheless once the party is over, these same party-goers are “squeezed” from their civilized values and are left with emptiness, transformed into people that don’t care, people that don’t have respect, they become those of the lower class, the poor, in this case “pulpless halves.” Fitzgerald uses the motion of the taxi driving away and the preparations before a party to display the destruction of the upper class’s social and moral values. Characterization is used to portray the decaying of social and mural values of the upper class. At Nick’s first visit to his cousin’s house, Daisy Buchanan, he meets her husband, Tom Buchanan. At a discussion over dinner Tom reflects upon a book he suggests called ‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires,’ he states, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved…It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things,”(p.17). The concepts within the comment that Tom uses to state describe his opinion symbolizes the decay of social values. Tom’s social attitudes are laced with racism. Tom tries to destroy other’s moral values by instigating that his race is more superior to others, but instead he is corrupting his own values by saying such comments. As a result, Fitzgerald depicts Tom’s racist attitude to symbolize the fall of social values. As the story develops, Nick later meets up with Jordan to have a conversation about Jay Gatsby. Jordan explains, “...