The Great Gatsby Compare And Contrast

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed exemplify the desire for one to aspire to the unreliable expectations of love and desire, equality and opportunity, and desire and wealth set by the American Dream in order to combat the reality of one’s past to build his or her future.

In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby fights to reclaim the love he once had with Daisy Buchanan. Before Gatsby left to join the war, he and Daisy were heavily involved with each other. Daisy ended up marrying another man under the assumption that Gatsby was either dead or not going to return. Upon his return, Gatsby decided to enroll the help of Nick to rekindle what he and Daisy had some

five years prior:
He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house-just as if it were five years ago. (Fitzgerald 109).

Gatsby wants to go back to the life he used to have with Daisy and build the life they planned to have together.

In an ideal world, Gatsby would be able to get back together with Daisy and have the life that he wants for them, but in reality, Daisy is married to someone else and has a child with said someone else. Daisy moved on and continued her life without Gatsby, who is relentlessly holding onto an unobtainable goal supported only in hope and his obscure belief in true love.

Although the American Dream has proven itself to be unobtainable in Gatsby’s quest for love, it has proven semi-tangible in his goal to become rich. As a young man, Gatsby worked with a man named Don Cody. Don Cody showed Gatsby a luxurious lifestyle that, paired with his unprosperous upbringing by his poor, unsuccessful parents, strengthened his desire to be wealthy.To a young Gatsby, Cody’s wealth, more specifically his yatch, “ represented all the beauty and glamour in the world”( Fitzgerald 100). Don Cody’s wealth inspires Gatsby to get his own. Cody lived a life of luxury that included money, women and comfortability. These traits contributed to the aspirations Gatsby set for the life he wanted to have. Gatsby’s newly-founded wealth set him apart from his parents and the life of poverty that could have inevitably become

his.
In contrast to the obtained wealth of Jay Gatsby, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, and other people of color like her, did not have the opportunity to escape poverty and monetary inequality because they did not have basic equalities and opportunities of those of the privileged European-Americans in The Great Gatsby. In The Warmth of Other Suns, The Great Migration maked a time of exponential change for black communities in the South. People emigrating North in great numbers because of lynchings and other acts of violence towards the African-American community, committed by European-Americans, with little to no consequence. In the Summer of 1926, when Ida Mae was thirteen years old, she heard of a situation with two black boys and a white woman, “ “They said something to the white lady,” she said. And as best as Ida Mae could make out, the white people had taken the boys and hanged them in Oklahoma that morning… The surviving Carters packed up and left Mississippi… the Carter migration was a signal to Ida Mae that there was, in fact, a window out of the asylum”(Wilkerson 31). By fleeing Mississippi, the Carters became an example for all African-Americans who wanted an escape from the oppression and inequality of the south. The history of the south has always been one that put black people in a suppressed and subordinate position. People like the Carters saw that the only escape from the physical and mental abuse of the south, was to leave.
Violence was not the only reason African-Americans decided to leave the south.The absence of opportunity also contributed to the relocation of people of color. People like Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, who had a degree in medicine, were not able to grow in their professions because of the inability of white supremacists, and those who agree with them, to give opportunities to blacks. “In the dark hours of the morning, Pershing Foster packed his surgery books. his medical bag, and his suits and sports coats in the trunk… He headed in the direction of Desiard Street… away from St. Francis Hospital, which wouldn’t let doctors who looked like him perform a simple tonsillectomy”(Wilkerson 5). Pershing Foster only wanted to continue his career as a doctor and become someone he could be proud of despite the social norms that plagued his society. During the times of slavery, black people were only trusted to pick cotton and serve their white counterparts. African-Americans like Mr. Foster are trying to prove themselves to be something more than insolent, subordinate imbeciles that are cultureless, talentless and uneducated.
The American Dream promised African-Americans the basic rights and opportunities that were offered to their European-American counterparts.But, in reality, Americans, both black and white, struggle to obtain equal opportunity in relation to each other. America is divided into social classes: There are those who can afford the luxuries of life, and there are those who can only dream of them. Nickel and Dimed portrays the struggle that is being an American who fits into the upper class that can dream of luxury. When estimating the expense of living, Barabara configured:
I figure that if I can earn $7 an hour-which, from the want ads, seems doable-I can afford to spend $500 on rent or maybe, with severe economies, $600 and still have $400 or $500 left over for food and gas. In the Key West area, this pretty much confines me to flophouses and trailer homes-like the one, a pleasing fifteen-minute drive from town, that has no air-conditioning, no screens, no fans, no television, and by way of diversion, only the challenge of evading the landlord’s Doberman pinscher… Still, it is a shock to realize that “trailer trash” has become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to. (Ehrenreich 12).

Millions of Americans work hard everyday in hopes of reaping reward. The idea of deserving what is worked for is often prevalent in the work ethic of many Americans in today’s society. Said society was built and is maintained on the backs of these working people. So the question remains: Why does hard work not amount to equal or greater reward? As part of the American Dream, wealth and comfortability should be a given, but that is not true. In The Warmth of Other Suns, African-Americans emigrated in search of those far-fetched ideologies, associated with the American Dream, that have proven themselves to be unattainable. People have immigrated from all over the world in search of “the perfect society” and sought that society in America but if it is not a reality for those who are from America, how could it be true for people that are not?
Even though all working-class Americans struggle, white privilege causes the divide between races to become greater.

Barbara Ehrenreich says, “Just bear in mind, when I stumble, that this is in fact the best case scenario: a person with every advantage that ethnicity and education, health and motivation can confer attempting, in a time of exuberant prosperity, to survive in the economy’s lower depths”(Ehrenreich 10). Barbara realizes that her being white gives her the upper hand or a higher stance in poverty. In contrast to the underprivileged African-Americans like Ida Mae and Mr. Foster of The Warmth of Other Suns who dream to be seen as equals in comparison to the over privileged people who will always have the “white upper-hand”. Meaning, since Barbara is white, she has more power or influence than someone of color. This is also prevalent in The Great Gatsby when Tom tells everyone about a book he read and how he agrees that “if we don’t look out the white race will be -- will be utterly submerged” and that “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things”(Fitzgerald 13). This reinforces the color barrier that is eminent in the society of America. America should be a land of equality, but it is not. If one is said to be on a level of poverty, there should be no diving factor, such as race, that makes one group more prosperous than another based off of said uncontrollable

factor.
The Great Gatsby, The Warmth Of Other Suns and Nickel and Dimed are all novels that showcase the struggle that is being an American. The American Dream entails wealth, comfortability, love, equality, opportunity and justice. These novels depict the semi to total unreliability of the American Dream. Each character experienced his/her own form of disillusionment. Be it Gatsby’s failure at true love or Ida Mae’s quest for freedom from the ideologies from the past. There seems to be no solution to the social injustices that plague the society of the U.S. The new generation of Americans are tasked with finding such solution and reinforcing the idea of the American Dream by infusing it with reality and truth. Until the American Dream becomes real, new injustices will arise in this community and there will be a never-ending cycle of problems. But, if everyone adapts the mindset of effective change and practices equality and a modern attitude, the American Dream can become more real than it is now.