The Great Gatsby Essay:
How does Gatsby represent the American dream? What does the novel have to say about the condition of the American dream in the 1920s? In what ways do the themes of dreams, wealth, and time relate to each other in the novel’s exploration of the idea of America?
According to how James Truslow Adams defined the term, the ‘American Dream’ ensures that "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement regardless of social class or circumstances of birth". For this reason, millions of people all over the world rushed into the continent to search for and accomplish their goals. Since this was a prevalent trend throughout the 19th and 20th century, there are many literatures portraying American Dream, and one of them is ‘The Great Gatsby’.
Gatsby as a child spent his life in poverty in rural North Dakota. He had a lover, Daisy, who got married to Tom Buchanon by the time Gatsby was studying at Oxford after returning from the WWI. Gatsby has afterwards raked in the money so diligently that he finally became excessively rich. As a result, he finally had a huge mansion and held extravagant parties every Saturday night. At this point of novel, the author begins to reveal Gatsby’s true personality and hidden reason for scraping the money so hard, which is Daisy. In other words, Gatsby became wealthy and held parties all in order to impress Daisy, whom he is still in love with. Gatsby had a dream, to get together with Daisy again, and he pursued his goal with his amazing ability to turn a dream into a reality, for so long time, until he was shot just because of an unfortunate misunderstanding. This is shown in the following sentence, directly quoted from the book which says: Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. All these factors prove that Gatsby represents the American dream.
Other than Gatsby, the novel itself also has some relevance to the American dream, particularly in the 1920s. At this time period in America, economy soared, which brought unprecedented levels of prosperity to the nation. Also, with the WWI finally put into end, people wanted to compensate for their distress from WWI through squandering money all over. This led to sprawling private parties and ‘speakeasies’, the secret clubs that sold liquor. Both of these trends in America enabled American residents to become filthy rich over a short period of time, either by selling illegal drugs and alcohol or others. In the case of this novel, Gatsby became extremely wealthy through selling illegal drugs and then opened extravagant parties so frequently. This overall increase of Americans’ wealth brought them closer to their own dreams. In Gatsby’s case, he opened parties, inviting major celebrities, bringing lots of people into his great mansion. He appeared to be surrounded by spectacular luxury, courted by powerful men and beautiful women. He was the subject of a whirlwind of gossip throughout New York and is a kind of legendary celebrity. By doing this, Gatsby could impress Daisy, attract her, and fall into love again, which was Gatsby’s only dream since Tom Buchanon married Daisy.
To sum up, the novel presents a repeating cycle that was prevalent in the 1920s in America, among the ‘time’, ‘wealth’, and ‘dreams’, the American dream. To define a little more, this time period led to extreme wealth of majority of Americans, which made a lot of dreams possible to accomplish, whether it’s love or other goals.
