Rethinking The American Dream In The Great Gatsby

Rethinking the American Dream The term “American Dream” has its origins long before the Roaring Twenties, used to describe the American way of life. The ideology that every man, regardless of race, gender, class, religion, sexuality, and disability shall be treated to the same rights, democracy, equality and opportunity. A member of the Lost Generation in the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of all time. In his most successful novel, The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, Fitzgerald condemned and defined what he thought the American Dream was. During a period of economic prosperity with a prominent cultural edge, self-made wealth, romance, youth, happiness, resourcefulness, and power were

Some were born into the greatness of the upper social class while others were tormented through poverty due to the imbalance of the society and cycle of life. In the first chapter of the novel, Nick revealed what his father suggested to him during his youth “a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth” (6) and “all people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had” (5). These statements from Nick’s father conveyed a message that inequality at birth is inevitable; not all people in this world will be able to have the same advantages. Unlike Tom Buchanan, Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker and Nick Caraway, who came from the inherited wealth, Gatsby was a self-made wealth man. He reinvented himself in a new life of success and lavishness, despite his money came from organized crime, Gatsby became an embodiment to the 1920s American Dream. It became obvious that social mobility, wealth and success cannot be evenly

In chapter I, Nick revealed the location and the conditions of his new home when he stated, “squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousands a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard, and the consoling proximity of millionaires all of eighty dollars a month.” (9) and the portrayal of the valley of ashes as “a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke” (27). According to the illustrations, there’s a tremendous difference between the opulent and the penniless. Compared to the splendid mansions of the millionaires like Gatsby and Tom, the valley where ashes take the forms of houses and the men who move dimply in the powdery air, an image of desolation and poverty. Money is associated with an elaborate lifestyle while poverty represented struggle and anxiety. Even though Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby were both prosperous, the difference of the two was “old money”, the inherited wealth from their ancestor, and “old money”, where the money came from organized crime or bootlegging, Gatsby was somewhat less of a man than Tom Buchanan. People like George Wilson and Myrtle Wilson came from another level of social status, listless and impoverished, the only hope of people living in the Valley of Ashes to be able to climb up the