The Great Gatsby Research Paper

The American Dream in The Great Gatsby The Twenties brought a lot of change, probably the biggest change being the American dream. The dreams in The Great Gatsby become the classic American dream of wealth and class. Gatsby transforms himself into a "self-made" man in order to fulfill this dream and win Daisy's affection. Fitzgerald’s portrayal of the themes; love, money, and class in The Great Gatsby illustrate how the American Dream is changing.
A strong theme in The Great Gatsby is how love is the foundation of Gatsby’s dream. All of Gatsby's efforts to become extremely wealthy and to move from the working class to the upper class are made in an effort to win back Daisy. In the novel, Gatsby is talking to Nick about his and Daisy’s past

This made most Americans believe that money was the center of The American Dream. Fitzgerald writes, “... Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor” (Fitzgerald 150). The elegant wordage helps the reader understand how much the characters valued money and wealth. In an article written by Millton R. Stern, he states. ”Fitzgerald saw most Americans desiring merely the substance of respectable wealth, having no imaginative sensibility of anything beyond the identities of money… they remain wistfully perplexed by the feeling that after everything is attained, they are still missing "something"” (Stern). The American dream had turned into greed and always wanting more than what you have. By the end of the book, the greed that surrounds the story results in Gatsby's murder. In an article titled The Great Gatsby, the author states, ”Daisy is the incarnation of Gatsby's deepest aspiration, the ultimate prize and the fulfillment of his heroic vision of himself. However, Daisy requires wealth to win her, which Gatsby lacked five years before when he lost her to the brutal materialist Tom Buchanan” (Burt). In the end, it turns out that Gatsby was wrong about how important wealth is to his new identity and how essential it is to win Daisy's love. In reality, Gatsby's money only makes him shallow “friends’’ who profit from his extravagant parties and