The American Dream In The Great Gatsby

“He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled under the night” (Fitzgerald 180). In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, the novel demonstrates with a play on words how people dream of their futures, only to find out that their dreams were right behind them the whole time. The dream that is explained in Fitzgerald’s novel shows a person’s deepest desires through an object that they view as their “future” dream. Some of those dreams pertain to the “American” dream, with America in the 1920’s, also called the

T.J. Eckleberg. The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg are introduced in The Great Gatsby like this, “But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, … The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, … dimmed by a little by many paintless days under the sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground” (Fitzgerald 23-24). The eyes of T.J. Eckleberg are shown first as like how “God” was watching over his people and when they started to follow their own ways instead of God’s ways, then He has allowed certain bad things to come upon them and they have to work “the long way” without God in their lives and as a result He has drifted farther away from their lives. However, even though that to most people the eyes of T.J. Eckleberg are just “eyes”, some of the people, like George Wilson, see them has they are a part of something deeper. When George stares endlessly at the eyes and sees them as they are “the Eyes of God”. As George stares at the eyes he feels as if they are telling him something important; after he realizes his wife Myrtle was cheating on him and confronts her saying, “I told she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window”- …- “and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!” (Fitzgerald 159). George’s statement to Myrtle is true, God does see everything. He knows our every action we do, every thought we think of, and every sin we commit. We can fool others around us, but we can never fool God. We also learn from George that, “God sees everything” (Fitzgerald 160). The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg are a splendid description how God sees everything in the world that he created, and how we are all equally judged. The people of the Vally of Ashes can be seen like ants. Ants can cross boundaries and pop up even in the richest and