Compare And Contrast Buchanan And The Great Gatsby

The idea of the American dream has been around for decades. This intangible notion that America is the land of opportunity and everyone, regardless of their social class, can achieve success involves sacrifice, hard work and risk-taking. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby represents the American Dream gone bad. the characters of Gatsby and Buchanan, both, in different ways, represent the falseness of the American Dream. Some scholars claim that the novel conveys the idea that life is meaningless and holds no hopeful promise, that the dream of a brighter future, while it may be motivating, will ultimately prove an illusion. Other scholars disagree and claim the novel conveys the idea that there is meaning in life and the possibility
While Gatsby is very motivated to achieve Daisy and the social status she represents, his life has no substance in the end, for he is driven by materialistic goals. Since Gatsby is desperate to achieve Daisy, he does have motivation to live. There are times during the novel when he thinks he will finally make her his. Many scholars have closely analyzed the ending of the novel. After Gatsby is killed by Wilson, Nick Carraway suspects that Gatsby must have “paid a high price for living to long with a single dream”. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real” (161). Before his death, Gatsby probably realized how illusional his dreams were. He wasted his entire life, holding on to a dream he realized would never come true. Nick goes as far to imply that Gatsby realized life has no meaning, for a rose is ugly and the sun hitting the grass is not real, the nothing in this world is important. If something is meaningful, that’s only because you chose it to mean something. Thus, people think that Fitzgerald was trying to say that life has no