Theme Of Romance In The Great Gatsby

The American Dream, that beautiful mistress, the siren song that draws us in and eats us up. From the moment we are born, we are spoon fed the narrative that if you work hard and go to college and do all of the things that one is meant to do, then you will live a long, full, extraordinary life, and that you will be happy. And then you grow up, and find yourself surrounded by unhappy adults, and find that you, too, are an unhappy adult. You find yourself waking up from the dream, angry and violated. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses the structure of a classic twenty’s love story to tell the more sinister tale of the rise and fall of the American citizen, and to unravel the threads that so clumsily hold together the American Dream, so that …show more content…
Romance is what drives Gatsby, his overwhelming belief that he can “repeat the past” (). It is romance that convinces him that if he can only go back five years, to the spot where Daisy and he first met, and win her, he will be satisfied. Happy. He ignores the fact that Daisy is now married and even has a child, because recognizing such facts would sour his dream, crumble it before him. In the same vein, Americans like to overlook the evidence that is piled up in front of them; the gaping chasm of a wealth gap that exists in the country, that day in and day out the rich get richer and the poor poorer, because it’s so beautiful to believe that if we “run faster, stretch out our arms farther,” then we, too, will feel the warmth of the sun on our ocean soaked bodies (). But Gatsby doesn’t end up lying on the beach five years ago, he ends up dead in a pool. His romance, like so many things in The Great Gatsby, starts out innocent and hopeful and beautiful, but is stagnant and putrid by the novel’s …show more content…
A whole lot of people die; Myrtle dies, Wilson dies, even Gatsby, the great Gatsby, the man whose hopefulness burned so bright behind his eyes that to look straight into them was to go blind, the man who “rose above it all”, he dies, too (). Who, then, is left? Tom and Daisy and Jordan, and to a lesser extent, Nick. And they haven 't got a care in the world. They 're free to go back to living their extravagant, foolish lives, leaving behind bodies and bottles of liquor and piles of ashes. No, this ending is not happy, nor should it be. Fitzgerald does not view the American Dream with indulgence, he glares at it with disgust. There is no way of reaching the finish line unless you’re born on the other side of it. The green light at the other side of the bay stretches into infinite expanses that go far beyond our reach. It remains an intangible object glowing in the distance, one that we can see but cannot touch. To Fitzgerald, the American Dream™ is exactly that- a dream, starry-eyed and