What Are The Similarities Between The Great Gatsby And The Crucible

The American Dream What if you were told you will never achieve your dreams? Florence King once said, “People are so busy dreaming the American dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they’re all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the age of human error.” Humans have a tendency of wanting what they cannot have or being oblivious to what they do have at the moment. Many authors are aware of this blind-spot, an evident flaw in human nature, and use it to their advantage to write about characters that apply to their reader’s emotions. The Crucible, The Great Gatsby, and Of Mice and Men all express this flaw in human nature, discreetly known as the “American Dream”. The Crucible conveys this

Scott Fitzgerald, shows the American Dream in a slightly different outlook than The Crucible but, with the same negative connotation. Gatsby spent his whole life trying to be something great. He made something out of himself from nothing and never stopped trying to be the best. Gatsby was the epitome of living the “the American Dream”, in 1920’s terms, yet he was still not satisfied. He wanted more. He wanted Daisy. Daisy was a girl that Gatsby met at a time in his life that he couldn’t put a stop on. He had other obligations and when he was sent off, she found someone new but by no means at all, better. Daisy’s most famous line, “I’m glad she is a girl, I hope she is a fool, it’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool,” acknowledges the fact that her husband was cheating on her and she knew about it (Fitzgerald 21). All Daisy ever wanted was this extravagant life with a lot of money and expensive things, some people’s definition of the American dream. Daisy is wishing upon her daughter to be a fool so she will be oblivious to the things that could hurt her and focus on the more lush things of life. Meanwhile, Gatsby was trying to find his way back to Daisy. Nick Carraway, the narrator in The Great Gatsby, stated, “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams-- not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion,” trying to explain the fault of

He had everything he could ever want, he had the American dream, and he was still not content. In the short story “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson says, “Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit. To be great is to be misunderstood,” explains the greatness of being different from the rest of mankind (Emerson par.14). Gatsby was just another misunderstood being in a world filled with people who all wanted the same thing; The American dream. Gatsby understood that, he had that life, but he knew that living this so called “dream”, that was so broadly made viral, was never going to fulfill him. The saddest part of having all these high hopes for a better life is that people get trapped in their ideas and fail to realize their happiness will never come from living a lavish life. However different, the characters of the book Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, also came face-to-face with the tragedy of their dreams