America is considered to be the land of opportunity, wealth, and prosperity. After all, Thomas Jefferson coined the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and included it in the United States Declaration of Independence. This created a thought or a dream for people to start a new life in a strange land. The dream states that all men are created equal, man can trust and should trust his fellow man, and the good, virtuous, and hardworking are rewarded. However, through the years the American dream has become corrupt and evolved over time. Typically a person aspires to be better than his or her parents while accumulating things such as love, wealth, high status, and power on his or her way to the top. In The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald demonstrates that the American dream is corrupt and flawed because wealth is attainable but status and privilege is not.
James Gatz is from North Dakota whose “parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people” (Fitzgerald 98). As a teenager he changed his identity to Jay Gatsby to start a new life and live the American dream. Jay Gatsby’s dream is to spend his life with Daisy Buchanan, but the only way he can ever be with her is to become wealthy. He knows if he does not have money Daisy will not even consider him. “He and this Wolfsheim …show more content…
She makes an attempt to leave her lifestyle and escape her class to pursue happiness with the rich. Myrtle is the opposite of Daisy being “faintly stout” (25). She talks like she is rich and from the upper class, “These people! You have to keep after them all the time” (32). Myrtle is having an affair with Tom Buchanan to try and take on his lifestyle, but it does not bring her happiness. She ends up gaining nothing and eventually is killed when she is hit by a car that Daisy Buchanan is driving. She becomes a victim of the very group that she wanted to become part
James Gatz is from North Dakota whose “parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people” (Fitzgerald 98). As a teenager he changed his identity to Jay Gatsby to start a new life and live the American dream. Jay Gatsby’s dream is to spend his life with Daisy Buchanan, but the only way he can ever be with her is to become wealthy. He knows if he does not have money Daisy will not even consider him. “He and this Wolfsheim …show more content…
She makes an attempt to leave her lifestyle and escape her class to pursue happiness with the rich. Myrtle is the opposite of Daisy being “faintly stout” (25). She talks like she is rich and from the upper class, “These people! You have to keep after them all the time” (32). Myrtle is having an affair with Tom Buchanan to try and take on his lifestyle, but it does not bring her happiness. She ends up gaining nothing and eventually is killed when she is hit by a car that Daisy Buchanan is driving. She becomes a victim of the very group that she wanted to become part