Evaluate The Great Gatsby as a criticism of the corruption of the American Dream:
The Faux Dream
The American Dream is a national philosophy in/of the United States in which democratic morals are professed as a promise of prosperity and wealth for its people. The American Dream, first expressed by James Truslow Adams in 1931, says that citizens of any class can achieve a "better, richer, and happier life.", or move up social classes. But the American Dream was a fantasy, a myth, and had already been proven to be so years before Adams had stated this.
We’d all like to believe that you can become a rich, high class citizen by doing an honorable days work, but this is a lie. As told in the Great Gatsby, the lead character, Jay Gatsby, is a mysterious man. A government agent? A drug store owner? What does he do? That is the question for the most of the book. Until it is revealed that he is nothing more than a common bootlegger of the 1920’s era. Yet he started out smart, athletic, but had nothing but a dream to become something more than an American citizen, a member of the America high class. So he did what he had to do if he ever wanted to reach full happiness, in this case it is the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, but that is the point of the American Dream, the right to purse happiness.
Before the American Dream even materialized in the minds of the masses, it was proven incorrect, false, fictional, a lie. The author of the Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, understood something about people, he understood how we work, how it is inevitable to have some form of segregation one way or another.
"Better, richer, and happier life." The first page of the Great Gatsby, Nick Carroway (the narrator) says this about the way his mind works: “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” Nick’s attitudes toward Jay Gatsby are of two minds and contradictory. At times he seems to disapprove of Gatsby’s ethics and possible illegal activity, but he also romanticizes and admires Gatsby, describing the events of the novel in a nostalgic and elegiac tone. Nick has nothing, similar to Gatsby, before he got into illegal activity, and Gatsby continuely tries to get Nick involved with whatever Gatsby does, but Nick declines time after time, showing Gatsby that Nick still sees hope in the American Dream.
He is Gatsby’s neighbor, and he is the one who gets him his golden girl in the end. Gatsby has done illegal things to move up his class status, and yet he has still not reached happiness, which in other words is Daisy. And in the end, it took Nick, who is a nobody, to get him his happiness, but its not lasting.
In the end of the book, Gatsby finally meets up with his golden girl Daisy, but at the price of his life. Gatsby spent over 6 years reinventing his life, breaking the law, and putting his future in the line for happiness, trying to achieve a "better, richer, and happier life." Gatsby does attain this, but breaking the original philosophy that we have all grown up believing in.
"A lot of people have been bootleggers. I'm not justifying the behavior I'm just saying it was the thing to do"
Sources Cited:
- “The Great Gatsby” F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
- “The Center for The New American Dream” http://www.newdream.org/about/
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