2. American Dream
The failure to achieve the American Dream is one of the most important themes in the novel The Great Gatsby. It’s established early on in the first chapter when a stranger asks Nick for directions, making him “a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler,” like the pioneers who traveled West in hopes of building better lives for themselves. Afterwards, Nick tells the reader that he read a series of Immediately after that, Nick tells us that he read a series of finance books in the hopes of making his fortune. Fitzgerald uses this juxtaposition of bankers and pioneers to suggest that the American Dream of owning land and making a name for one’s self has been subsumed by the desire to become rich and thereby perpetuate a capitalist system.
The main character, Jay Gatsby, personifies the American dream, being a self-made man who pulled himself out of poverty, only to meet a tragic end. Gatsby desired to be rich and successful in the hopes of reuniting with Daisy. He was ready to be involved in organized crimes and bootlegging to attain his dream. The irony is that the bootlegging that made Gatsby wealthy is the same reason Daisy leaves Gatsby. Gatsby's dream self-destructs since it was corrupted in the beginning. Like the American Dream, it has been corrupted by
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The "single green light" on Daisy's dock that Gatsby tries to grasp from his own house across the bay represents the "unattainable dream," the "dream [that] must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it". Furthermore, the green light represents the hazy future, as Nick claims in the last page of the novel: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter – to-morrow we will run farther, stretch out our arms farther….". The green light represented the ideal American dream, what was hoped from