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The American Dream In The Great Gatsby

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One of the major themes in The Great Gatsby is the American Dream, and especially its failure. The novel is set in New York City on Long Island during the Roaring Twenties, which was a time of celebration after World War I. Most significantly, it was a period of time in which people experienced prosperity and optimism, and were surrounded by some sort of restlessness and impatience: no one could wait for their dreams to come true. The Roaring Twenties were also a time of idolization, hypocrisy, moral failure and excess. Likewise, the way some people tried to pursue their dreams and the way they lived was often characterized by those destructive and negative aspects. Lots of people lived their lives excessively, without structure and with
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“The Valve” by David R. Slavitt supports the negative results of Jay Gatsby’s attempt to chase Daisy and the past, which is an unrealistic dream. In the book F. Scott Fitzgerald uses Jay Gatsby as a symbol of a lost American Dream in the 1920s. In the book after the gatsby returns from the war with money he tries very hard to get Daisy so he buys a house right across the bay (green light represents daisy), he throws big parties hoping she would wander in, and he does illegal business with meyer wolfsheim so he can get a lot of money to attract daisy. In the book, Jay Gatsby tends to live his life in the past, So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past (Fitzgerald, p180). In this quote Fitzgerald is trying

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a great American novel, which criticizes wealth in the American dream. Nick Carraway is the narrator who observes characters such as Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom primarily. Jay Gatsby wants the perfect American dream. He has worked most of his life to get the fame and wealth that will impress Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is his love.

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F.Scott Fitzgerald is an American novelist and a short story writer. He is the author of the famous novel “ The Great Gatsby”, which is written in the 1920’s. The period of the 1920’s is well known as the roaring twenties due to lack of morales and the lowering of standards and expectations, people intended just to have a good time not caring about the outcomes of their and how they will effect their lives. Fitzgerald wants to prove in his novel the death of “The American Dream” it’s just a myth. The author of this novel shows the death of the american dream through the events surrounding Gatsby, and Daisy.

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867 Words | 4 Pages

Often times people think that you can get anything you want by working hard and staying true to yourself, but what if getting what you want means changing your name and becoming wealthy by illegal business. This is what Gatsby did, but died without ever making his dream a reality. The American dream is a happy way of living that is thought of by many Americans as something that can be achieved by anyone in the US, especially by working hard and becoming successful. In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Nick Carraway narrates how he and Jay Gatsby met and the times that they were together.

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The Downside of the American Dream In the United States, everyone regardless of race, religion, and gender are granted equal opportunity to achieve their American Dream. In The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, he presents the American experience of achieving the American dream. Fitzgerald uses symbolism, imagery, and similes to demonstrate the factors that led to the corruption of ones’ American dream.

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1032 Words | 5 Pages

The American dream is just a dream which can’t be implemented in the real world. While writing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald described the actions of the human society by critiquing the high class and low class ultimately providing his view towards the American dream in 1920s. Throughout the book; “The Great Gatsby”, American dream is shown to be a corrupted dream that leads to destruction. Myrtle, Gatsby and Daisy are 3 main characters who have significantly shown to be corrupted and destroyed by this dream. The desire for high status and luxurious life is what draws Myrtle into establishing a relationship with Tom.

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996 Words | 4 Pages

The novel, The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald examines the life of Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s main dream in the book is to achieve the american dream in order to give the love of his life what he knows she is accustomed to. The woman he loves is Daisy and they met before he went off to war and they fell in love. After he left the army he did not have anything, he knew a rich business man who helped him gain his own riches. Eventually Daisy married a man named Tom Buchanan.

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904 Words | 4 Pages

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”. These are the hauntingly beautiful words that conclude what is to be considered one of the most important novels written in American Literature. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald illustrates the disillusionment of the pursuit of the American Dream during the Roaring Twenties. The novel follows Nick Carraway and his journey throughout West Egg in New York, where he meets and befriends the mysterious and affluent Jay Gatsby. As the economy grows throughout the 1920s, many people waste their money on foolish and unnecessary luxuries.

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257 Words | 2 Pages

In the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are many important themes that help develop the meaning of the work as a whole. The most important and relevant theme throughout the novel would be the American dream. Jay Gatsby born as James Gatz came from a midwestern family that wasn't wealthy. Gatsby came into his own money which made him West Egg (pg. 98). When he was a soldier he met Daisy and that is when he wanted to be rich and have a lavish lifestyle because he liked Daisy and she was born into money.

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In the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jay Gatsby’s elusiveness leads to his funeral, with all but two people not attending. All that Gatsby wanted to do was to rise above his poor upbringings and live the American Dream, just as his mentor did before him. But, the process of conquering this dream was not as smooth as it was thought to be. Through Gatsby’s lying and deceiving, Fitzgerald reveals what would be a fundamental theme of the novel: that people will do whatever it takes to make their dream a reality.

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772 Words | 4 Pages

"The negative side of the American Dream comes when people pursue success at any cost, which in turn destroys the vision and the dream." In this quote, by Azar Nafisi, it explains how dreaming can be tainted by reality, and that if a person doesn’t compromise they may suffer. In the book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American Dream is one the many themes present. The American Dream that most people in this book hope to have involves wealth, status, a fun social life, and someone to lust after. It is the life they all strive to have until they obtain it and see its meaningless composure.

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1133 Words | 5 Pages

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is a reflection of the American Dream. Written in 1925, the book tells the story of a man named Jay Gatsby, whose main driving force in life is the pursuit of a woman called Daisy Buchanan. The narrator is Gatsby’s observant next-door neighbor, Nick Carraway, who offers a fresh, outsider’s perspective on the events; the action takes place in New York during the so-called Roaring Twenties. By 1922, when The Great Gatsby takes place, the American Dream had little to do with Providence divine and a great deal to do with feelings organized around style and personal changed – and above all, with the unexamined self .

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382 Words | 2 Pages

The American dream was to be able to become a self-made man. The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald is a great example of people realizing the american dream. In this story there are two types of rich, the new type and the old type. The old types are the ones who inherited their wealth, while the new types are the ones who just found their wealth and are the new wealthy. The story is about Gatsby, a new type of rich that realized his american dream.

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The American Dream, an ideal that was first defined by James Truslow Adams in the 1931 novel Epic of America. Adams defined the dream as, "The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" (Adams 214). The American dream although not formally defined had been widely written about prior to Adam's defining of the term. It was a central theme in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby.

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The American Dream: Promising or Hopeless? A statement from the article “Rethinking the American Dream” reads, “(…) like so many before and after him, was overcome by the power of the American Dream” (Source E). The American Dream is the ideal that everyone should possess an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through determination. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel

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