American Dream Corrupted in the Great Gatsby

Great Gatsby -- the American Dream

The Great Gatsby is a novel that uses the theme of the American Dream in a number of ways, and it is not a stretch to explain that F. Scott Fitzgerald was showing the dark side of the elusive American Dream. The themes used in The Great Gatsby revolve around those issues in the Roaring Twenties that were linked to the newly wealthy people; and Fitzgerald uses those themes to present the flaws in the American Dream. This paper points to some of those passages in the novel that relate to the American Dream.

The Great Gatsby's American Dream Themes

Tanfer Emin Tunc presents an essay in the book appropriated titled The American Dream in which he points to how the concept of the American Dream is woven into Fitzgerald's novel. Fitzgerald uses the protagonist Jay Gatsby to "…exemplify the rise and fall of the American Dream," and the novel also traces what Tune calls "the arc of a life as it begins in wonder, reaches for the stars, confronts society's spiritual emptiness and gratuitous materialism and ends in tragic death" (Tunc, 2009, 67).

The narrator, Nick Carraway, is turned off by the terrible destruction of World War 1, and so he arrives in New York in 1922 to try and make it big on Wall Street. But soon Carraway realizes that moral decay is more prevalent that hopefulness (i.e., the American Dream); in fact Fitzgerald refers to Long Island as a "wasteland." The social environment in New York is polluted with the likes of Gatsby, whose pursuit of the American Dream (money) was made possible by his part in the trafficking of illegal booze (during Prohibition), trading in stolen securities and bribing police officers. This approach to achieving the American Dream of course is a corrupt one -- achieving great wealth through organized crime -- and by presenting Gatsby this way, Fitzgerald was criticizing the concept of the American Dream.

Gatsby wears silk shirts (part of his American Dream is to be flashy), and when Gatsby throws dozens of expensive silk shirts onto a table, Daisy realizes that all those shirts reflect Gatsby's obsession with the American Dream. Knowing Gatsby is phony, she cries, and says, "They're such beautiful shirts…It makes me said because I've never seen such -- such beautiful shirts before" (Fitzgerald, 61). Daisy's voice is "full of money" (Fitzgerald, 76) which excites Gatsby; he is also excited that "…many men had already loved Daisy -- it increased her value in his eyes" (Fitzgerald, 99).

Part of Gatsby's charm as far as Daisy was concerned was that he was different. On page 144 of the novel Gatsby -- showing his phoniness, which is part of Fitzgerald's presentation of the falseness of the American Dream -- tells narrator Carraway: "She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her." But in truth he didn't know much except how to accumulate wealth and material items. Indeed, throughout the novel it is apparent that Gatsby's accumulation of garish material items (and his obnoxiously gaudy mansion) was done to win Daisy back. Carraway, more objective than the other characters, views this social landscape as "a new world, material without being real" (Fitzgerald, 123).