Theme Of The American Dream In The Great Gatsby

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Recommended: Theme of the great Gatsby and how the author shows it in the book

In everyday life mankind becomes more and more keen to certain milestones such as leaving home and becoming financially independent and the ability to achieve them. Although achieving these milestones is never easy, they all revolve around the traditional social ideal by which equality of the opportunity is available to all, allowing the highest aspiration and goals to be achieved. The novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is an exquisite tale of America in the 1920s. It is about a fabulously wealthy man named Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. It illustrates the idea of the death of the American Dream and shows that the main theme of Gatsby is indeed “the withering American Dream”.

In the roaring 20s the main key to success was by longing for hope, hard and the idea of the American dream, which showed the strive for equality. Even though the main definition of the American dream still is same, the values have changed. Some people are becoming more reach than the others and the gap between the rich and the poor is constantly increasing and people are not treated equally. The novel illustrates this idea and that social discrimination does exist in dialog between Tom Buchanan and George Wilson at Wilson’s garage at the valley of ashes as Wilson negotiated Tom to sell him his car. “When are you going to sell me that car?”(Wilson) “Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now”(Tom) “Works pretty slow, don’t he?”(Wilson), “’No he doesn’t’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it to somewhere else after all.’”(Fitzgerald 28) This conversation between these two shows a great deal of social discrimination, Tom obviously being the superior one. Firstly he pretends to car...

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... dream is not described fully or shown, so his is not part of the American Dream. Myrtle however had a dream, which was to be married by Tom. She had an illusion that marrying Tom or at least being with him would make her happy, live the snobbish life and fit into the upper class but her dream faded with her death.

The novel shows the death of the American Dream unquestionably through the characters of Myrtle and especially Gatsby. Gatsby’s dream fails when Daisy decides not to say that she never loved Tom leading to the scene where she and Gatsby flee to the Buchanan’s house, running over Myrtle, killing her and erasing all the hope she had. The novel also shows that Gatsby is indeed the withering American Dream with all the humiliation he got, as he was a step to achieving this dream.

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004.

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