Men and women all around the world work countless hours of their lives to fulfill their dreams. In America, many people strive to make the money necessary for them to be able to buy, what they believe, will truly make them happy. In the majority of cases, this is known as the American Dream. In “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jay Gatsby is a man that comes up from nothing and becomes involved in criminal activity to live out his version of the American Dream. Gatsby’s case is similar to Charlie Wales from “Babylon Revisited”, in that he discovers that there is more to the dream then the money and the dream is not always going to live up to the expectations he has for his life.
The American Dream is an ideal, a thing that is known for being unreachable. Some view it as an unlimited wealth, the perfect house with the bright white picket fence out front, and a beautiful family to go along with it. Others may view it for what it is, a dream—something that we can all see happening and wish that we could have but it is only a dream, not suitable for the real world. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defined the American Dream as, “An American social ideal that stresses egalitarianism and especially material prosperity; also: the prosperity or life that is the realization of this ideal,” (1). Jay Gatsby lives his life based on the idea that if he has large amounts of money and the woman that he believes to be his true love, Daisy, he will be living the American Dream. However, things don’t work the way that he is expecting because the truth always comes out and for Gatsby, it ends his life.
Jay Gatsby was born into a poor family living in a small town. He grew up an intelligent and ambitious boy whom set his goals in life to ha...
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... people in his life that would and could be there for him and love him for who he was instead of how much money he made. Charlie and Gatsby fought to live out the American Dream, yet neither of them ended up in the life they were hoping for—Gatsby lost his life all together. The stories both prove that you can have all the money and you can have all of the material possessions, but if you do not have the people in your life that make it worth living, you will never live out the real American Dream.
Works Cited
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Babylon Revisited.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8. Baym, Nina. Levine, Robert S. Eds. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. 2164-2178. Print.
Fitzgerald, Frances Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Print.
"American Dream." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.
Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald criticizes the American dream very elaborately and shows the idea of the American dream to be connected with the goal of achieving wealth. Fitzgerald does not praise wealth in the Great Gatsby but condemns it by drawing attention to the dreadful fall made by Gatsby. Fitzgerald finds the desire of wealth to be a corrupting impact on people. Throughout the novel, the characters with money contradict the idea of the American dream. They are portrayed to be very snobbish and unhappy people. The American dream in the novel is shown to be unachievable. For some time, the American dream has been focused upon material things that will gain people success.
The character of Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s commentary on the logical fallacies of the American Dream are closely intertwined, which is why Fitzgerald goes to such great lengths to separate the two. By distinguishing Gatsby from the flaws he possesses allows the reader to care for Gatsby, and the impact of his death all the more powerful when it finally occurs. By making Gatsby a victim of the American Dream rather than just the embodiment of it, Fitzgerald is able to convince his audience of the iniquity of the American Dream by making them mourn the life of the poor son-of-a-bitch
The Great Gatsby, a novel by Scott Fitzgerald, is about the American Dream, and the downfall of those who attempt to reach its impossible goals. The attempt to capture the American Dream is used in many novels. This dream is different for different people; but, in The Great Gatsby, for Jay, the dream is that through wealth and power, one can acquire happiness. To get this happiness Jay must reach into the past and relive an old dream; and, in order to do this, he must have wealth and power.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Babylon Revisited”. Short Fiction: Classic and Contemporary. 6th ed. Ed. Charles Bohner and Lyman Grant. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006.
While everyone has a different interpretation of the "American Dream," some people use it as an excuse to justify their own greed and selfish desires. Two respected works of modern American literature, The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman, give us insight into how the individual interpretation and pursuit of the "American Dream" can produce tragic results. Jay Gatsby, from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, built his "American Dream" upon the belief that wealth would win him acceptance. In pursuit of his dream, Gatsby spent his life trying to gain wealth and the refinement he assumes it entails. Jay Gatsby, lacking true refinement, reflects the adolescent image of the wealthy, and "[springs] from his Platonic conception of himself" (Fitzgerald 104).
The Great Gatsby is a view into the society of the 1920's masterfully created my Fitzgerald. In this society the one and only Gatsby falls right into the middle. Gatsby is an exemplary example of one trying to live out the American Dream. "The American dream is the idea held by many in the United States of America that through hard work, courage and determination one can achieve prosperity." (Wikipedia) So basically the American Dream is to have money, and a family. Gatsby got his money, but what he really wanted was Daisy Buchanan.
The American dream. Everyone has different opinions on what the American dream is. Their 'ultimate goal'; in life. The people in The Great Gatsby think they are living that dream, but I beg to differ. The only one who I believe is living out something close to the American dream is Tom, and I will prove so.
The freedom in self endowment has always been the fuel to the average American citizen and his drive toward success. In other words, Americans always strive to achieve the ever so revered American Dream. What is the American Dream? David Kamp describes the American Dream as "the idea rooted in the United States Declaration of Independence which proclaims that "all men are created equal" and that they are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights" including "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."(Kamp). The dream lies deeply rooted in American society and the very mention of it lights a passionate fire in the hearts of American citizens everywhere. The idea behind the dream is that if an individual has sufficient willpower, he or she has a fair chance of achieving wealth as well as the freedom and happiness that come packaged with it. Essentially, it offers the opportunity of achieving spiritual and material fulfillment. It promises success at the cost of hard work and perseverance. Over time however, this idea of attaining success through hard work and perseverance has been skewed into one which exploits greed and carelessness and The Great Gatsby is an excellent affirmation of this. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald derides the gradual corruption of hard work and perseverance in the American Dream by utilizing the motif of driving and incorporating it with the the ideas of greed and carelessness.
Jay Gatsby’s life proves the unrealistic expectations people set for themselves when trying to achieve The American Dream. Gatsby used what we think of as The American Dream to help gain Daisy’s love back through things she left him for even if the means didn’t justify the ends. People will do anything to achieve the American Dream and although they have good intentions the American Dream seems to corrupt the mind of even the purest of souls. Gatsby becomes consumed with money, social status, and what his leisure time consisted of because he cannot obtain what he truly wants even with all of his money which shows that the American Dream he strived will never become a reality.
Through the use of symbolism and critique, F. Scott Fitzgerald is able to elucidate the lifestyles and dreams of variously natured people of the 1920s in his novel, The Great Gatsby. He uses specific characters to signify diverse groups of people, each with their own version of the “American Dream.” Mostly all of the poor dream of transforming from “rags to riches”, while some members of the upper class use other people as their motivators. In any case, no matter how obsessed someone may be about their “American Dream”, Fitzgerald reasons that they are all implausible to attain.
Wealth, material possessions, and power are the core principles of The American Dream. Pursuit of a better life led countless numbers of foreign immigrants to America desiring their chance at the vast opportunity. Reaching the American Dream is not always reaching true happiness. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby achieves the American Dream, but his unrealistic faiths in money and life’s possibilities twist his dreams and life into useless life based on lies.
A story isn’t a story without a deeper meaning. This proves true with the book The Great Gatsby, a book set in the roaring 20’s where the American Dream was the only thing on everyone’s mind. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald dives into the downside of the American Dream and the problems it causes. Through imagery, flashbacks, and irony, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes of the complexities of the American Dream.
The simple definition of the American dream is a state of happiness a person hopes to achieve by obtaining materialistic prosperity through hard work. This however has not always been the dream. In early America the dream of many was to venture west, find land, and start a family, but as time progressed the dream has transformed into a need for materialistic possessions such as a car or a large house. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald reveals the how corrupt the American Dream has become and how truly irrelevant money and worldly possessions are to becoming genuinely satisfied. He does this through his portrayal of Gatsby’s confused love for Daisy or the idea of Daisy, Daisy and Tom Buchanan’s marriage, and the death of Gatsby.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, “The Great Gatsby”, is one of the few novels he wrote in 1925. The novel takes place during the 1920’s following the 1st World War. It is written about a young man named Nick, from the east he moved to the west to learn about the bond business. He ends up moving next to a mysterious man named Gatsby who ends up giving him the lesion of his life.
He assumes that wealth and possession equate to happiness and harmony. Gatsby’s American dream can be seen as being corrupted by his surroundings of wealth. Although as wealthy as his surroundings, his money does not necessarily mean he matches well with the East Eggers he is associated with. He spends enormous amounts of money, yet no one really likes him. He entertains large groups of people in hopes of attaining something greater.