Jay Gatsby and the American Dream

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America has been a land of dreams from its beginning. People immigrate to start a new life and reinvent themselves, but even the hardest working individuals have been mistreated. There’s so much to discover and to strive for. The American Dream is a concept that appreciates the struggles of those who live in America, and it’s something we’d all like to believe exists. Because, it’s so desirable, tales are often told about people who live a greater life after moving to America. Some like to think that Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby exemplifies a man who achieves the American Dream. While Jay Gatsby seems to be a great representative of the successful American Dream, his life truly shows the failure of the American Dream.
The American Dream is an exceptionally broad term. It includes ambitions of wealth, family, comfort, and anything a citizen or future citizen could ever want. Originally, the settlers wanted America to give them freedom and an escape from the harrowing inescapability of the European class system. The adventurous men were energized by their dreams of building a nation, but the definition changes through the centuries (Berman 128). Some arrive to escape their debts, and others wish to escape the rule of tyrants. Yet, the prevalent definition of the American Dream in the Twenties and The Great Gatsby appears to be the pursuit of materialistic comfort; everyone desires a fancy car, profuse amounts of money, a huge mansion, and a carefree life (Smiljanić). Gatsby, however, is not an average American.
The imaginations of Jay Gatsby solely focus on his love, Daisy. He earns all of his money to please Daisy, and all of his parties are thrown in hopes of her attending. No matter what, he strives to win her back and he will n...

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...ls, and bad luck, Gatsby’s American Dream becomes a horrid failure. A successful American Dream turns out only to include attainable dreams and to hope for more is to taunt fate.

Works Cited

Berman, Ronald. “The Great Gatsby and the Good American Life.” Jay Gatsby. Ed. Harold
Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004. 125-136.
Decker, Jeffrey. “Gatsby’s Pristine Dream: The Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in the
Tribal Twenties.” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism 210, (1994): n. pag. Web. 16 April 2014 .
Fitzgerald, Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004.
Mangum, Bryant. “The Great Gatsby.” Encyclopedia of the Novel. Ed. Paul Schellinger. London and Chicago: Fitzroy-Dearborn, 1998, 514-515.
Smiljanić, Siniša. “The American Dream in The Great Gatsby.” Academia.edu (2010/2011)
Web. 16 April 2014 .

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