The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘He paid a high price for living too long with a single dream’.

Explore the theme of dreams in ‘The Great Gatsby’. How significant is

this theme in other American texts you have read?

One of the principle themes of Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ is that

of dreams - all inextricably bound to the American Dream. The

ideology of spiritual and material success is one that is powerfully

explored through Jay Gatsby’s character and his passion for Daisy

Buchannan. The American Dream is justice, liberty, equality and

wealth which it claims, can all be achieved through thrift and hard

work. The theme of the American Dream or the Anti-Dream has and

continues to be frequently used as the central theme in American

literature.

Jay Gatsby’s dream is to gain, status, wealth and the love of Daisy

Buchannan, who embodies everything that Gatsby yearns for. The

setting of the novel represents the status that Gatsby dreams of.

Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby both live in West Egg, which is

representative of ‘new money’. Whereas Daisy and Tom Buchannan live

in East Egg, which is inhabited by people with ‘old money’. In

chapter 7, at the Plaza Hotel, Tom, deploring Gatsby’s advances to

Daisy, calls him ‘Mr. Nobody from Nowhere’. Given the rootless

drifting that seems to characterise the lifestyle of the Buchannans

and their class this criticism might seem misplaced. ...

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... a prototypical American ideal. Their journey, which

awakens George to the impossibility of this dream, sadly proves that

Crooks is right that ‘such paradises of freedom, contentment, and

safety are not to be found in this world’.

Fitzgerald said that ‘America’s greatest promise is that something is

going to happen, and after a while you get tired because nothing

happens to people except they grow old’. Although it seems that

authors of American literature are anti the American Dream, it is

probable that they are not pessimistic at all, except they are stating

the importance of knowing the difference between truth and illusion

that the past is impossible to retrieve, that in fact there is nothing

wrong with having dreams and aspirations, but as Boorstin said, ‘the

dream is to be reached for and not to be lived in’.