Corruption Of The American Dream In The Great Gatsby

The American dream is a long standing ideal symbolizing the hope that one can achieve financial success, political power, and everlasting love through dedication and hard work which is showed throughout the novel “The Great Gatsby”. “Long before ‘America’ became a country, it was a continent, and long before it was known to exist as a continent, it was a vision and a dream” (Freese 78). This vision or dream was portrayed in the novel by Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby is a novel about the unconditional love of the self-made man Jay Gatsby to a woman that embodies for him true love, success and the ultimate possession. Although, one of the major themes of this novel was not just, love but the decline and corruption of the American dream. “The Great Gatsby, we are told, is not simply a chronicle of the Jazz Age but rather a dramatization of the betrayal of the native American Dream in a corrupt society” (Ornstein 54).

For centuries the United States of America has been a symbol for hope, religious freedom, economic prosperity and social upward mobility. Millions of settlers have immigrated to the United States, leaving behind their home countries, in the hope to make their personal American Dream come true. One of the foundations of this vision or of the American Dream can be found in the Declaration of Independence of 1776, where the founding fathers “held certain truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” (Declaration of Independence