F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, captures a vision of the luxurious lifestyle of Long Island during the Roaring Twenties, known as the era of consumerism and economic prosperity. This prosperity resulted from increased mass production and circulation of goods, which occurred because of the technological advancements caused by America’s involvement in World War I (BBC). People now have more money and freedom and can dream bigger dreams. This eventually came to be known as the American Dream, the idea that anything was possible if you lived in the United States. In his 1931 book, The Epic of America, James Truslow Adams explains the American Dream as the ability “of the ordinary man to hold fast to those rights to ‘life, liberty, …show more content…
This demonstrates that Gatsby’s pursuit of material wealth resulted in shallow relationships, bringing into question the desirability of pursuing such a dream in the first place. What were his motivations? Bertrand Russell, in his 1998 novel The Impulse to Power, states, “Men desire to expand, and their desires in this respect are limited only by what imagination suggests as possible. Every man would like to be God, if it were possible” (Russell, 9). If we connect this statement to the pursuit of the American Dream, then it can be said that people desire to pursue this dream because it will give them more control over their lives, making them more God-like. This explains Gatsby’s personal motivation for becoming wealthy. Jay Gatsby, originally named James Gatz, is the epitome of this human desire to be God-like. When he invented the character of Jay Gatsby, he was doing so thinking he had the power to erase history and be born as a new human, something that only God has the power to do. Gatsby is not God, but he chooses to ignore this reality in order to pursue his materialistic