Through the illusory lives of the main characters in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald exhibits that chasing hollow dreams based on the past leads only to misery. The array of characters in this novel each alter their lives minimalistically and drastically to reach their goal of the American Dream. “The American Dream is an etho known throughout American history that every citizen in the United States should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative” (Bloom). After World War I, the era of the 1920s welcomed new aesthetics and ambitions to become successful. In The Great Gatsby, various personas go through meticulous extents to attain triumphs. …show more content…
"It makes me sad because I 've never seen such – such beautiful shirts before” (Fitzgerald 98). In the The Great Gatsby, the titular character, Jay Gatsby holds tightly to an illusion that compromises his gaudy lifestyle and leads to his demise. As genuine as Gatsby’s façade seems to be, the dogmatic antagonist, Tom Buchanan suspects that it is an alter ego and sets out to reveal to everyone that Gatsby is a corrupt bootlegger. The confrontation between Tom and Gatsby is crucial to the tale since it displays colossal character development and plot progression. Gatsby 's fracas with Tom is the beginning of Gatsby 's downfall. After his perfect vision of Daisy finally told Tom that she never loved him, Gatsby let his emotions get the best of him and entered a fit of rage while displaying a rather undesirable side of himself that he has tried very hard to cover up. By doing this, he essentially rejected the disposition he had spent his whole life creating and destroys any chance he had of creating a life with Daisy. In “Rebirth and Renewal”, Steinbrink’s literary criticism of The Great Gatsby, he mentioned that “life is subject to continual renewal”, something Jay Gatsby does not acknowledge. By not accepting this …show more content…
Throughout The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, varying characters experience a multitude of events in attempt to achieve their strenuous goal of accomplishing the American Dream in the 1920s. The pursuits of wealth and happiness, principles of the American Dream, are incredibly profound and significant within The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel criticizes the wealthy class, as well as first elaborates on how to differentiate between the two prominent affluent groups, consisting of those born into wealth and those who acquired their wealth that frequently clash with each other. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby contrasts the polar opposite lifestyles and aesthetics of East Egg and West Egg, displaying the fast- paced ephemera of East Egg, and “West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them” (Fitzgerald 6). The copious amounts of trials and tribulations regarding trivial materialistic wants the protagonists and deuteragonists face in The Great Gatsby end in their deaths as well as detrimental scarring