The Diamond as Big as the Ritz by Scott Fitzgerald tells the story of a family who achieves great wealth, ultimately leading them to hold people captive in a pit near their mansion and murder their summer guests. This is clearly not your typical fairy tale or short story, starting with "once upon a time", and ending with "and they all lived happily ever after", with its strangely convoluted plot. However, like many children's stories, it was written with a specific intent: in this case, to show the corrupting effect of materialism on humanity, using rhetoric to subtly motivate the audience to think of the consequences of their greed.
What started as a seemingly normal story quickly turned stranger than a parade of pink elephants, as the main character Unger arrives at this house that is literally on a diamond as big as the Ritz, and is exposed to crazy riches. The backstory of the inhabitants of the house is revealed- the mountain was discovered by accident giving the Washington family a plethora of wealth of diamonds. As money always does, they were corrupted by their newfound source of power. The Washingtons kept slaves, held prisoners in a big hole, and killed people so that they would not be discovered. The discovery of their diamond would make it worth nothing, as "if [their] secret should transpire ... [the Government] might take over the claim immediately", causing them to lose their wealth. This would clearly be disastrous; wealth is everything to this family. And of course, nothing ends well- a lot of people explode, but not after the homeowner climbs to the top of the diamond mountain to talk to god, "[lifting] his head high to the heavens like a prophet", as if he thinks he's Moses about to receive the Ten Commandments or something. But no, the mountain is still bombed by airplanes. Oh well. Sorry fake Moses. So here we see how wealth corrupts, and sometimes causes large explosions.
Even in the world of today, the corruption of wealth surrounds everyone. It may not cause the blowing up of unrealistically sized diamonds, but it definitely has an effect of a lesser scale. And in a world like this, a world primarily motivated by money, its not surprising to see the terrible happenings on our screens. We are privileged in that we don't experience these travesties first hand, but we should use the maybe over exaggerated, but maybe not, story of a giant diamond to remind ourselves the perils that could become of this material driven world.
 |
| This is Real Moses. |
