The American Dream In The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The first literary reference of the American Dream appeared in 1931 in J.T. Adam’s novel Epic of America. But without using this exact expression, F. Scott Fitzgerald had already publish a novel commenting on the myth of American ascendancy in 1925, The Great Gatsby. With the Gold Coast mansions on Long Island, New York as its setting, this literary classic captures the aspirations that represented the opulent, excessive and exuberant 1920s” (Bloom, 67).
In this essay I will analyze how the events in the novel The Great Gatsby depict the changing of society and the standards and values in America during the 1920s. This novel includes characters from different social classes and this essay aims to examine the relationship between these social
classes and the elements which bring to the downfall of the 1920s American Dream.
It is necessary here to clarify exactly what is meant by American Dream. The dream had various definitions over the years, but in the literature, the term tends to be used to refer to freedom, self-reliance, desire for success in life, for something greater.
J.T.
Adams was apparently the first who used and defined the term “American Dream”, in 1931: “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement”( J.T. Adams 16)
In the past century, the American Dream has been found associated with material items as an indication of attaining success.
This widely known term is present throughout the novel, despite the fact that this expression in not mentioned in the novel, Fitzgerald still portrays the increase and decrease of the American Dream in The Great Gatsby by using the character of Jay Gatsby.
Gatsby, the main character in this novel, achieved a huge success in his life and became very wealthy, with no money, only with a plan and a desire for achieving his dream. It is not clear how Gatsby produced his wealth, but is somehow clear that he was implicated in some illegal business. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald shows that the American Dream is feasible not only by working hard and following the rules of society, but it is possible doing things that are not permitted by
law.
In this novel, Jay Gatsby is sketched by the author as a man who was grown in a poor and unfortunate boyhood, but he became a person whose assets are worth one million dollars or more, he has a great house and lots of friends. Gatsby is a perfect example of self-made success, he has a remarkable fortune and also he became a new man in comparison with the man who was in the past. All of the assets, the condition and the ways in which Gatsby gained all of this may be the exact definition of the American Dream, but these elements will cause the falling of the American Dream.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, in this novel, clearly shows how a dream can be broken by the character’s greed. Gatsby’s dream “is a naive dream based on the fallacious assumption that material possessions are synonymous with happiness, harmony, and beauty” (Fahey 70). His American Dream has become corrupted by the state of great comfort, extravagant living and great luxuriousness that preoccupied him continually.
Jay Gatsby obviously fulfills his dream, but concurrently fails to obtain the Daisy’s love.
Although he has made his fortune being engaged in dishonest and fraudulent business dealings, his heart beats only for Daisy and he has no room in his heart for another woman. “He has lived not for himself, but for his dream, for his vision of the good life inspired by the beauty of a lovely rich girl” (Fahey 71). Gatsby’s desire for being wealth comes from the beautiful and rich Daisy Buchanan. Daisy’s family considered Gatsby to be inappropriate for their daughter, because he comes from a family lacking sufficient money to live at a standard considered comfortable or normal in a society. I think that Gatsby sees in the figure of Daisy, the deity Pecunia, who was the goddess of money and wealth in the Romanian mythology and he did great efforts to become a wealthy person and his riches will be like an offering for his deity, Daisy.
Gatsby said that her voice was “full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals song in it” (Fitzgerald 127).
I believe that she can be considered a siren, because she lured Gatsby with her wonderful voice (“The Great Gatsby: The Corruption of the American Dream through materialism”), like the mythological sirens which tempted the sailors in dangerous places with their enchanting voices. Gatsby becomes fascinated by her voice and all things that he done, was in order to obtain her love, but he won’t realize that the only thing that her voice will give him will be the
money.
“On one side there is West Egg, and on the other there is East Egg. This division can be seen not merely as a division between the haves and the have-nots, since some people in West Egg are also rich. It’s meaning is that of a symbolic representation of two sets of moral values” (“The American Dream in The Great Gatsby”).
This two lands are opposite, the West is generally understood to mean traditional values and the families who live there make great efforts to achieve a good life, that represents the definition of the American Dream. However, the East, signifies the corruption of the American Dream, there is the obsession for money and assets and according to Bloom: “The lure of the East represents a profound displacement of the American dream, a turning back upon itself of the historic pilgrimage towards the frontier which had, in fact, created and sustained that dream” (Bloom 75).

Tom is first described as “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax” (Fitzgerald11).