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The American Dream In The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

738 Words3 Pages

American patriots celebrate the United States as a beacon of opportunity for people looking to escape poverty and begin a new life of fortune achievable by hard work. However, the American Dream is nothing more than a fantasy that corrupt individuals destroy. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nick Carroway, an affluent Minnesotan spends the summer on the rapidly urbanizing East Coast and involves himself with the life of his ambitious neighbor, Jay Gatsby, and his rich cousins, Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Exploring their chaotic lives, Nick discovers the grave consequences of capitalism and the American Dream. Through displaying these consequences, The Great Gatsby rejects the American Dream.
The settings Nick visits show the negative …show more content…

Gatsby’s American Dream, Daisy Buchanan, is a socialite with generational wealth. He builds his life by lying, stealing, and cheating to live up to what he perceives as Daisy’s worth. However, despite embracing the American Dream and building wealth, he loses Daisy to Tom Buchanan, her materialistic husband. Losing his American Dream, Gatsby laments how “he left feeling that if he had searched harder, he might have found [Daisy]… he knew that he had lost that part of [life], the freshest and the best, forever” (Fitzgerald 153). Despite his insistence on maintaining his marriage with Daisy, Tom entertains a mistress, Myrtle Wilson. Myrtle seeks the life of the rich, one that her husband can not provide her, and embraces the American Dream to achieve it. Myrtle clutches onto Tom as a way out of the lower class. However, when she strays beyond what Tom deems her place in life and insults Daisy, “making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan [breaks] her nose with his open hand” denying her dream (Fitzgerald 37). The husband of Myrtle, George Wilson, wishes for success. He follows the path of the American Dream, but it brings him only misery and leads to the loss of his wife. Mere days before the pair moves to the West to save their marriage from Myrtle’s affair, she dies in a car crash, the fault of the Buchanans. After Tom tells Wilson that

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