What Is Gatsby's View Of The American Dream

The Great Gatsby Paper

Fitzgerald's view of Jay Gatsby’s specific vision of the 1920s American Dream. Fitzgerald seems to be criticizing not the American Dream itself but the corruption of the American Dream.

The ideal of the American Dream is based on the fantasy that an American can achieve success regardless of race, or religion simply by working hard in life. The term “success” is used with the fortune that the independent man can win. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald examines and evaluates Jay Gatsby’s particular vision of the 1920s American Dream. As a self-proclaimed “tale of the West,” the novel goes through questions about America and the diverse choices of the American Dream. In this manner, As a novel that has much to say about

With wealth comes the opportunity to reinvent his identity, this was inspired primarily by a “single green light, minute and far away” (21; ch. 1): this is the house of Daisy Fay Buchanan, the very wealthy, former Louisville belle whom Gatsby had loved before the war but who marries the immensely wealthy Tom Buchanan of

What was once for leaders like Thomas Jefferson a belief in self-reliance and hard work has become what Nick Carraway calls “the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty” (98; ch. 6). The energy that might have gone into the pursuit of noble goals has been channeled into the pursuit of power and pleasure, and a very showy, but ultimately empty, form of success.

Gatsby’s dream can be identified with America herself with its emphasis on the inherent goodness within people, youth, vitality, and a magnanimous openness to life itself. With the destruction of Gatsby, we witness a possible destiny of America herself. Critic Matthew J. Bruccoli, writing in Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, quotes a letter written by Fitzgerald while composing Gatsby: “That’s the whole burden of this novel—the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.”

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