The American Dream In The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby depicts a class struggle between the poor, the rich, and the richer. It yields a very complex message about the Jazz Age while telling an amazing story about how the fabulous Jay Gatsby pursues the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. However, he fails. Ultimately, he has a deadly obsession with the past and how life used to be. However, this pursuit is highly unrealistic. The story helps Fitzgerald relay an important message about dreams to the reader. In his most famous work, F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts Jay Gatsby’s love-motivated passion to recreate the past despite its impossibility, showing Fitzgerald’s underlying theme that there comes a point where some dreams die. Gatsby has an uncontrollable need to return

Five years prior, he had everything he could have wanted—Daisy Buchanan. However, when he left to fight in the war, he lost her. He spends every waking moment after that trying to get her back. His efforts involved becoming filthy rich, hosting lavish parties, and inviting her around to further their relationship. He was happy when he was with Daisy and he assumes that the same will be true if she comes back to him. He makes all this money in an effort to equate himself financially to Tom, her current husband. He thinks that if he has as much money as Tom, she will see him as capable of supporting her needs and will feel able to live without Tom’s financial help. He also throws extravagant parties. However, he doesn’t behave in the traditional party-like manner; he actually simply observes the fun everyone else is having. He only has so much going on because he truly believes that she will notice him because of the vitality that bleeds from his house. Eventually, Gatsby gets Daisy’s cousin to invite her over for him so that

At first, he interprets the green light at the end of her dock as meaning “go.” By the end, the light fades to darkness and all hope is lost. Gatsby’s dream for a future with her is simply too unrealistic. Daisy has a child with her husband. It is a lot more difficult to end a relationship with someone in which you share an eighteen-year commitment to a new life. Another complication is Gatsby’s unrealistic expectations for Daisy. He wants her to tell Tom that she never loved him and only loved Gatsby all this time. This is untrue. She loved Tom when she married him and now cries that she “loves [Gatsby] now” and doesn’t understand why this isn’t “enough” for him. She “can’t help what’s past.” She “did love him once—but [she] loved [him] too” (Fitzgerald 132). Gatsby is unable to erase the time of Daisy’s life that he wasn’t there for. He can’t make Pammy disappear, nor can he change the fact that there was a time where Daisy fell for another man. He can’t handle the reality that five years have gone by and life has gone on without him. Even though he’s back, things have changed since he left and he can’t simply revert back to the way things were. When he’s confronted with the truth that he can’t return to the past, he cries “can’t repeat the past?...Why of course you can!” He then proceeds to look “around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just