The Great American Dream can be found in all aspects of F.Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” This belief that everyone can achieve happiness and success with hard work, regardless of where anyone comes from or is born, pertains to each character, with each striving or failing with varying degrees of success and consequence. The character’s of “The Great Gatsby” are placed within different roles among society in order to demonstrate the pursuit of this dream. Within the novel, Fitzgerald shows that this dream has been skewed by things such as money and corruption. Each character demonstrates the flaws in this dream, and how the chase of it can lead to unhappy outcomes for both individuals and American society as a whole.
With an “extraordinary gift for hope” (pg 8), Gatsby sacrifices himself to fulfil his dream, struggling to get into the upper class. In the end his dream fails …show more content…
He is the very embodiment of the American Dream, yet a classic example of how this does not necessarily mean that upon achieving it one finds happiness. He aspires to achieve this sort of success only to win the girl, blinding himself to whom Daisy is and what she has become. Gatsby’s dreams are ruined because he puts Daisy on a pedestal, making her perfect in his mind, something she cannot possibly live up to. The novel’s most poignant symbol, and the biggest representation of Gatsby’s dream, is that of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock as evidenced by “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes us then, but that’s no matter” (pg 171). To Gatsby it represents Daisy in all her form, it is his aspiration and his inspiration - the unattainable dream. Gatsby represents both the corrupted version of the American Dream, from his pursuing money
With an “extraordinary gift for hope” (pg 8), Gatsby sacrifices himself to fulfil his dream, struggling to get into the upper class. In the end his dream fails …show more content…
He is the very embodiment of the American Dream, yet a classic example of how this does not necessarily mean that upon achieving it one finds happiness. He aspires to achieve this sort of success only to win the girl, blinding himself to whom Daisy is and what she has become. Gatsby’s dreams are ruined because he puts Daisy on a pedestal, making her perfect in his mind, something she cannot possibly live up to. The novel’s most poignant symbol, and the biggest representation of Gatsby’s dream, is that of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock as evidenced by “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes us then, but that’s no matter” (pg 171). To Gatsby it represents Daisy in all her form, it is his aspiration and his inspiration - the unattainable dream. Gatsby represents both the corrupted version of the American Dream, from his pursuing money