Myrtle’s death in the Great Gatsby is the death of the common man, in the great adulterated mirage of the 1920s that is the American Dream. Myrtle is first introduced as the wife of a poor engineer in the valley of ashes. She is another one of the many people who are in the dark underside of the American Dream. She desperately tries to escape her spot from the lower class living living in the Valley of Ashes by associating with the upper class as much as possible. Fitzgerald describes her apartment as “―a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually―” (32). Myrtle’s environment represents …show more content…
Her life force was “violently extinguished” to represent a flame kept burning, but now gone (147). She is left in the dust, the bottom of the American dream with broken lips because she choked. Her passion to move up in the world, her life was forced to stay in her for so long that it had to fight its way out of Myrtle’s corpse. All her ambitions and dreams of escaping the dreary Valley of Ashes is gone. The worst part is that this event does not even matter in the grand scheme of anybody important. Just another poor person has died, no other thought can be brought out. Tom did not even glance back at Myrtle but just said “We’ll take a look...just a look” (147). This shows how little Myrtle’s hopes mattered to the rich Tom Buchanan, the false expectation created by the American Dream. Myrtle represents the common man in dying while chasing the American Dream. She is killed by a car, the motif of freedom in the 1920s. The death of a common man by the very thing she was chasing this whole time, freedom. Myrtle Wilson’s death is the ironic dark side of the American Dream during the 1920s in the Great Gatsby by F. Scott