The American Dream In The Great Gatsby

America in the 1920s is notorious for the wild parties thrown by the extremely wealthy and top one percent of people. These parties would often last the entire weekend and sometimes went even longer. Nothing symbolizes this roaring 1920s lifestyle more than the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald in which follows a man named Jay Gatsby who is a very wealthy man with a very vague story about how he came into his wealth. Even though Gatsby has all of these materialistic possessions he is still chasing after his love from many years ago, he became stuck in the past after pining after this love and he ultimately began a chain of events which resulted in his own death. In Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, Gatsby is biggest contributor

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.” (FItzgerald 169). Consequently Gatsby knew he was chasing something that may never come to fruition and he knew the cost of doing so but he kept fighting since he knew he was chasing the only thing he felt that was worth living for. Gatsby wants to go back to the simpler time, back when the world was warmer to him and not the cold unforgiving world he lives in now. Gatsby is fighting a losing battle trying to swim upstream this is no better represented except by the last line of the novel, ¨So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald 189). This line has a lot of symbolism in it especially relating to following a dream which is seemingly always upstream. Gatsby feels as he is trying to fight for a dream which is somehow in front of him upstream but also stuck in the past. He is stuck with the dilemma of not knowing if he was to live in the past to see Daisy again or if he has to persevere and fight