The Great Gatsby And The Demise Of The American Dream

The Great Gatsby and the Demise of the American Dream Published in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has and still remains a staple of American Literature and is acclaimed by generations of readers. Often considered “the novel of the jazz age”, it tells of a time when lavish parties were an everyday thing. Above all, The Great Gatsby shows how the drive to achieve the elusive “American Dream” can corrupt oneself. Best remembered as a decade of prosperity and dissipation, and of jazz bands and flappers, the “Roaring Twenties” or “Jazz Age” was a time to be alive. “I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.” (Fitzgerald 46) For the first time, more Americans were living in cities …show more content…
Scott Fitzgerald uses the rambunctious atmosphere of 1920’s America to lay the foundations of one of his most well-known characters, James Gatz. Better known as Jay Gatsby, he appears too many as a wealthy, highly desirable and influential gentleman. It is not until later in the book we discover the real man behind the name. Gatsby embodies both the corrupted and uncorrupted American Dream. He views money as the solution to all his problems, specifically his obsession with Daisy, which leads him to a life of organized crime and despair. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that 's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And then one fine morning—so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald 180). In the end, Gatsby became so detached from reality and inevitable lead to his own …show more content…
He was a faithful and caring husband who absolutely adored his wife, Myrtle to the fullest extent. But her affair with Tom Buchanan and abrupt death by motor vehicle is what pushed him over the edge. He was misinformed by Tom that Gatsby had been the one driving the vehicle that fatally struck Myrtle, when in fact it had been Daisy behind the wheel. “She might fool me but she couldn’t fool God” (Fitzgerald 159). In an act of revenge he headed over to Gatsby’s estate and murdered him in cold blood then proceeded to commit suicide. At a glance, The Great Gatsby may appear as a crooked love story, which is partially true but even more than that it is a testament to the vision Americans in the “Roaring Twenties” had of dreams that in the end were just that, dreams. “That 's my Middle West . . . the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark. . . . I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life” (Fitzgerald