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Recommended: How fitzgerald used symbolism in the great gatsby

Frivolous pearls with hair tainted with the smell of champagne and party, the 20's was all jazz. The Twenties were a time to be alive; the wealthy had it all--- they were on top of the chain, and no one could bring them down. The lower class strived for the “American Dream”, a dream that consisted of material possessions and glamour that defined “success”, that the lower class could only dream of. F. Scott Fitzgerald breathed this era and “embodied in his tissues...the fluid polarities of the American experience: success and failure, illusion and disillusion, dream and nightmare” (Callahan 1). In this insightful American masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald illuminates the gradual decline of the American Dream of the Roaring 20's through the contrasts of characters and settings to illustrate the frivolity and lack of morality of the times.
Jay Gatsby, a dreamer of dreams, tangled in an array of webs formed by intangible dreams weaved by the past, illuminating “the romantic enlargement of the possibilities of life on a level at which the material and the spiritual have become inextricably confused”, as said by critic Marius Bewley (1). With pearls entrenched on the corners of the webs, Gatsby believed in a green light across his mansion on the West Egg, which reflected his belief “in the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us”, that resided in the heart of Daisy Fay Buchanan, who radiated everything Gatsby thought of the American Dream: status, wealth, and beauty. (Fitzgerald 193). Born as James Gatz from North Dakota, Gatsby “is not so much his identity with an American tradition of hard work and “luck and pluck” but rather his dreaminess, his entrapment in “a universe of ineffable gaudiness,” that illu...

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...corruptness of the woman who held Gatsby’s heart, was honest Nick. At the start of the novel, Nick Carraway writes to his readers: “I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores…” (Fitzgerald 1), painted by Fitzgerald to show the goodness that Nick had to his readers.
So, as the “rich get poorer and the poor get---children”, the American Dream was changing in the Twenties as the Stock Market boomed and World War I ended. Through the frivolous Buchanans and honest Nick, and the duality of New York, F. Scott Fitzgerald showed us the deterioration of the American Dream that he himself saw and experienced in the time of Gatsby the dreamer. “No-Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams” (Will 2).

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