The American Dream is the ideal that everyone is given an equal opportunity in being able to achieve their goals through hard work and determination. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the American Dream instead is materialistic and greedy. In The Great Gatsby people were ambitious and abrasive; they did whatever they could, to get where they wanted to be. Fitzgerald conveyed his ideal of the American Dream through Jay Gatsby. Gatsby was wealthy, ambitious, persistent, and got what he wanted any way he could, making him Fitzgerald’s biggest symbol of the American Dream. Gatsby, like everyone else in The Great Gatsby, was so lost in his ideals that he became irrational and stubborn, in the way that he thought everything would go his way. “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” (Fitzgerald 116). Today the American Dream has taken on a whole new meaning. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby the people’s American Dream was to become wealthy and achieve their goals through any means possible; in today’s era of social reformation, the American Dream has evolved into the ideal that everyone should have an equal opportunity to achieve their goals through hard work and determination. …show more content…
In reality Gatsby’s intentions were not for the sake of others. Gatsby’s so-called compassion was just an illusion for his selfish desires, as he cared not for the well being of others, only his own ambitions. He also only associated with or even “helped” Nick so that he could get closer to Daisy; if Nick had no relations to Daisy, who’s to say that Gatsby would have ever even noticed he existed? Even so Nick never needed any help; he was not struggling nor asking for Gatsby’s help. Jay Gatsby cared not for people of a lower social class, and he never had any intention of helping others unless it was for his own