The American Dream in The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald uses the character of Gatsby to comment on the false values of the society in which he lives. On the one hand, Gatsby strives to belong to the upper class society of eastbound Egg, while on the other hand, he is alienated from that society. He is a romantic illusion of the Ameri layabout ambitiousness, a stargaze corrupted by the materialism of the 1920s.

What makes Gatsby unique among pursuers of the American reverie is that his quest for wealth and status is inseparable from his savour of Daisy. Gatsby describes Daisy's translator as "full of money" (Fitzgerald 120). Gatsby also tries to buy Daisy's spang throughout the novel, and like Daisy's husband Tom, who comes from old money, believes that money can buy happiness. In Gatsby's heart this is true. When he and Daisy meet by and by a five-year separation, Nick, the novel's narrator, observes "there was a change in Gatsby that was manifestly confounding. He liter every(prenominal)y glowed" (Fitzgerald 90). When Gatsby gives Daisy a tour of his opulent house, purchased however with the thought of getting Daisy, "he revalued everything is his house according to the meter of response it drew from her well-loved eyes" (Fitzgerald 92). The back-story to the novel is the love juncture between the penniless Gatsby and Daisy when they were much younger. Before being s ratiocination overseas by the Army during World War I Gatsby believed he and Daisy would marry, but while he was ove

Gatsby, an advocate of self-improvement since an early age, invents an entirely rude(a) persona for himself, inventing "just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end" (Fitzgerald 99). Gatsby tells stack that he is the son of some "wealthy peck in the Middle West?educated at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years.

It is a family usage" (Fitzgerald 65). In reality his "parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm passel" (Fitzgerald 99). Gatsby is deliberately vague about where his wealth came from since he knows people will disapprove of his illegal activities. He achieves the American Dream of rags-to-riches, but it is an empty dream without Daisy. To Gatsby, Daisy is the American Dream. Although Gatsby and Daisy resume their love affair, she rejects him when she discovers how he made his wealth, and in any event she is similarly superficial and shallow to give up the life of the socially acceptable for love with the unacceptable. Even when Gatsby vaguely comes to recognize Daisy's shallowness, he does not forsake his dream of possessing her once again, and ultimately this resolved dream destroys him. As Nick comments, Gatsby "paid a naughty price for living too long with a undivided dream" (Fitzgerald 162). Gatsby refuses to examine his dream; one of his flaws is the inability to class reality from illusions. When he first gets together with Daisy after five years,
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