The American Dream In The Great Gatsby

The American Dream
After World War I, America seemed to guarantee unlimited financial and social opportunities for anyone willing to work hard – the American Dream. For some, however, striving for and realizing that dream corrupted them, as they acquired wealth only to seek pleasure. Even though the characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby appear to adore the freedom of the 1920s, their lives reveal the decline of happiness that results when wealth and pleasure swallow them. Specifically, through the wealth-greedy lives of three characters, Jay Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, and Daisy Buchanan, Fitzgerald portrays that a materialistic lifestyle does not lead to happiness and causes a decline of the American Dream.
A character who holds
firmly to an illusion of the American Dream is Jay Gatsby. Gatsby pursues wealth in order to win Daisy Buchanan’s love. He is dishonest with Daisy from the start by persuading her into thinking he is rich.
The two have an affair before he goes back to war and he is shocked that she has moved on when he returns. "As a seventeen-year-old he transformed himself from plain James Gatz, to Jay Gatsby for whom anything is possible” (Telgen par.56). Gatsby decides to follow a new model of himself that converts reality into possibility. "We see how the focus has become blurred: how the possibilities of life are conceived of in material terms. But in that heroic list of the vaster luxury items - motor-boats, aquaplanes, private beaches, Rolls-Royces, diving towers - Gatsby’s vision maintains its gigantic unreal stature” (Bewley par.12). Although he has all his materialistic possessions, he has not hoarded his wealth for himself. Everything he has done in life has been done to fulfill his dream which is to prove to Daisy that he is worthy of her. In fact, Gatsby pursues in illegal activity to get rich quick and win Daisy’s heart. “He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn‘t far wrong" (Fitzgerald 133-134). He is oblivious to how reality works because he declares
to Nick Carraway, his neighbor and Daisy’s cousin, "Can’t repeat the past? ... Why of course you can! I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before…She’ll see" (Fitzgerald 110). He believes that his possessions will convince her to forget the past five years of her life and marry him. When Gatsby takes Daisy into his house and shows her his belongings, he values each item according to the worth that she places on it. When she shatters his dream by accepting Tom over him, Gatsby has no further need for any of his possessions. No longer searching for his dream, the house, the clothes, and the cars mean nothing. Gatsby’s desire to have it all - money, class, power, and Daisy, no matter the cost - has corrupted his soul.
Tom Buchanan’s American Dream is to stay wealthy. He wants everything that an important person would have in the 1920s. Coming from a wealthy background, his life has little to no purpose. With no real career, his life is centered around polo ponies and fancy cars. Daisy, his wife, is nothing but an accessory to him, and also his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, which he has on the side, is only used for his pleasure. He rents Myrtle an apartment in New York and orders her to go there for his enjoyment whenever he wants. Unfortunately, Tom mistreats Myrtle by violently punching her in the nose in front of her sister and Nick when she teases him by chanting Daisy 's name. “The overall impression the reader has of this character is his physical power and brute strength” (Telgen par.20). Tom is portrayed as a coarse, aggressive, and short-tempered character of the novel because he lashes out numerously and uncontrollably.
Daisy Buchanan, born and married to wealth, has no values and no purpose in life. She finds her existence to be boring as she floats from one social event to the next. Daisy chooses money over love; despite her love for Gatsby, she marries Tom who gives her “a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars” for a wedding gift” (Fitzgerald 77). Because of her boredom, she resumes an affair with Gatsby which they had started years earlier. She is attracted by his good looks and his army uniform but later ditches him when she discovers he is not as wealthy as he leads her to believe. When Tom disrespects Gatsby’s background and challenges his outstanding wealth in public, she is moved but does nothing to defend Gatsby.
Daisy usually dresses in white, gold, and silver: the colors of money; “Her voice is full of money…I’d never understood before…that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…” (Fitzgerald 120). In spite of the wealth, she wonders what she will “do with the next day, the next thirty days, and the next thirty years” (Fitzgerald 118); unfortunately, she does not have a clue. Even her daughter, Pammy, does not give any meaning to Daisy’s life; she only views the child as another possession. She does not appear to spend much time or take much interest in her child’s life. She does not value the feelings of others or even human life. When she hits and kills Myrtle, she does not even stop the car to check on her. More importantly, when Gatsby is shot by Wilson, she does not even telephone or send flowers. Daisy is only worried about protecting and entertaining herself.
Part of the mess left by the Buchanans at the end of the novel includes the death of the main character, Jay Gatsby.
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made" (Fitzgerald 188). Tom is indirectly responsible for Gatsby 's death because Tom uses George Wilson 's hatred and jealousy against Gatsby to make Wilson believe that Myrtle was Gatsby 's mistress. This shows the true hatred and villainous side of Tom
Buchanan.
All throughout the novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald exposes a society that has corrupted the true meaning of the American Dream through Tom, Gatsby, and Daisy’s dull pursuit of wealth that only leads to misery. Each character uses wealth to achieve his/her dreams: Gatsby for Daisy’s love, Daisy to surround herself in her wealth, and Tom to support his lifestyle. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1924, while working on The Great 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" (Fitzgerald 180). The themes of The Great Gatsby are when dreams become an obsession they fall out of reach and materialism and greed cause the decline or decay of the American Dream and can only lead to misery.

Works Cited
Bewley, Marius. "Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America, by Marius Bewley." Narod. The Sewanee Review, n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.
"The Great Gatsby." Novels for Students. Ed. Diane Telgen. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1997. 64-86. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 27 Mar. 2014.