Jay Gatsby Is one of the pursuers of the American Dream and the mall character In the novel. For him the American Dream means: Rising from rags to riches, of amassing a great fortune that will assure a life of luxuriant ease, power, and beauty in an ideal world untroubled by care and devoted to the enjoyment of everlasting pleasure and nothing to intervene between wish and fulfillment. It Is a naive dream based on the fallacious assumption that material possessions are synonymous with happiness, harmony, and beauty. ” (Roberts 73, 2006) This dream seems to promise “wealth, the love of a high-status woman, and immediate justice. (Roberts 77, 2006) At first it seems that Gatsby has all of it – a great mansion with grand parties, he seems to be winning back Daisy (his one true love) and he can achieve everything he wants to. “Gatsby realizes, however, that as “a penniless young man without a past” (156) he will not be able to marry Daisy. ” (Mean 80, 2014) Therefore Fitzgerald also tells us that everybody cannot achieve the American Dream. “The fundamental presupposition that the American Dream can be achieved by anyone as long as they work hard turns out to be nothing more than a mere illusion, lie Intended to give people something to live for. (Semifinals, 2010) It Is for the ones that come from the high class and were born Into It Like Tom Buchanan. Tom Buchanan was born into his American Dream. He never worked hard as he got a lot of heritage from his parents. He does not want anything to change because in his opinion he is living the perfect life. Losing Daisy to Gatsby would mean a destruction of his dream because he thinks of her as one of his possessions. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.
It eluded us then, but that’s no matter?tomorrow we will run faster, against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. ” (Fitzgerald 180, 1996) This quote from the novel also shows that Gatsby really believes in the American dream but he cannot achieve it because he lives in the past and by doing that he only moves further away from his dream. Throughout his life he was moving forward but at the same time staying and living in the past. The one thing that Fitzgerald seemed to show perfectly throughout this novel is that American Dream is a myth.
A dream about becoming successful and having equal opportunities has been replaced by a dream to become unimaginably rich and a way to ultimate hedonism. Hence the so-called American Dream became the American Nightmare’. Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby offers a high critique of sass materialistic and corrupted American Dream. “The American Dream is too much an ideal ever to be consummated except in the sense to which “orgiastic future” corresponds.
