Aryan Anvekar

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Essay question: How is the idea of the American Dream expressed in the novel The Great
Gatsby?

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, published in 1925, “The Great Gatsby” is a tragedy and follows
the prominent themes of the American Dream, social class, hollowness of people of the
upper class and love and marriage. The style is satire, melancholy, sophisticated and
Fitzgerald uses metaphors and the technique of figurative language in order to produce a
nostalgic effect in his writing. The novel is written in first-person perspective and it is
narrated through Nick Carraway’s voice, which means that the novel is through Nick
Carraway’s point of view, and he describes events as he experienced them. An evident
genre is satire on social class, as Fitzgerald uses irony, and ridicule to make fun of
hypocritical social types. Additionally, another genre that is prominent is realism because the
novel shows how rough life really is.

The Great Gatsby is set in the 1920s, four years after World War One, during “Roaring
Twenties” when jazz exponentially rose in popularity and people loved to party. Another
major important aspect of the 1920s was the Volstead Act, which prohibited the consumption
and selling of alcohol. Even though alcohol was illegal around that time period, this didn’t
stop people’s demand for alcohol. This demand for alcohol gave rise to bootleggers. The
novel takes place in and around New York City, West Egg, East Egg and midway between
the Eggs and Manhattan called the “valley of ashes” where Myrtle and George Wilson live.
Fitzgerald made up the two fictional places West Egg and East Egg to portray different social
classes of the new rich and old rich. East Egg is where people who are rich from old money
come from whereas West Egg is where people who got rich from new money are from. Tom
and Daisy Buchanan are from the region of East Egg whereas Jay Gatsby is from the region
of West Egg. The people of East Egg look down upon those from West Egg and have a
rather audacious and arrogant attitude towards them because they feel as if those who
aren’t born rich are not properly rich. This gives the reader the impression that the people
from East Egg feel as if getting rich by earning money through hard work is sort of like
cheating. Nick comments that West Egg and East Egg are "identical in contour and
separated only be a courtesy bay", and although they have similar names, there is
"dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size", which shows that even though both
Eggs are closely similar in shape and size they are in fact very different compared to each
other in almost every other way.

While Nick and Gatsby drive into New York City for lunch, Gatsby just tells Nick the false
story of his life of how he is the son of a wealthy family in the Midwest. Nick has a hard time
believing this and thinks to himself “anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this
bridge…” “even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.” Gatsby’s ability to
achieve his goals seems limitless to Nick, especially in the large and liberated city of New
York. In this quote, Nick implies that becoming successful without having any connections to
a wealthy family is only possible in the United States and the theme of The American Dream
can be seen here. The use of the word “anything” is effective as it helps add emphasis to the
idea that you can literally become anyone you want to be and the reader gets the impression
that this could be a reason why so many immigrants and foreign people are drawn to
America, in hopes to become anyone they want so that they can get a better life. However,
the American Dream is false in a way because people who have gotten rich by “new money”
will never be properly classified as rich in comparison to people who got rich from “old
money.”

When Nick states that when Gatsby knew that when he kissed Daisy, and “forever wed his
unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind
of God,” he is implying that Daisy was basically Gatsby’s dreams and hopes for a better life,
which is Gatsby’s American Dream. The irony is that Daisy cannot live up to Gatsby’s
dreams and hopes as she ends up staying with Tom Buchanan in the end. Daisy was the
main part of Gatsby’s American dream because his main motivation to gain all the wealth in
such a short period of time through crime, was so that he could be worthy of Daisy. Now that
Daisy stayed with Tom in the end, Gatsby in a way failed to accomplish his version of the
American Dream. The theme of reality is evident here because Gatsby had such high hopes
for winning Daisy over, however, in reality, that never happened.

Daisy Buchanan can be seen as a personification of the American Dream when Gatsby
comments on Daisy’s voice and says, “It was full of money--that was the inexhaustible
charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it.” Here it indicates to the
reader that Gatsby’s main reason for attraction towards Daisy was her wealth and social
class, which Gatsby longed for as a child in North Dakota. If the American Dream is to do
with wealth and Daisy’s voice is linked with money, it is clear to the reader that Daisy is a
symbol for the American Dream. The idea that Daisy is a Symbol for the American Dream is
further reinforced when Gatsby describes Daisy as “high in a white palace the king’s
daughter, the golden girl.” This quote suggests to the reader that Daisy is a prize for Gatsby.
The phrase “golden girl” portrays Daisy as this perfect person with no flaws and is superior
to everybody else in every single way and it seems as if she is the jackpot that Gatsby had
been looking for.

Another example where Daisy is seen as the American Dream, is when Nick observes and
states that he saw Gatsby “stretch out his arms towards the dark water in a curious way” and
when Nick took a look towards the sea he “distinguished nothing except a single green light.”
The green light is a symbol for Daisy and the green light is the light that is coming from her
side of the dock. Furthermore, the green light could also symbol wealth and money. From
this quote, the reader can make out that Daisy was Gatsby’s ultimate goal because Gatsby
is longing to reach that green light, which is basically him winning Daisy over again.

In my opinion, I think that Fitzgerald has evidently expressed the theme of The American
Dream throughout the novel. After reading the novel, I felt like a message it was trying to
spread was that sometimes grass is not greener on the other side and that happiness cannot
be found through the American Dream's reliance on materialism. Furthermore, I feel like it
gave the reader an understanding of the harsh reality of life