What Is The Difference Between The Great Gatsby And Myrtle's Death

The idea of the American Dream has served as a driving force in American society for centuries. However, the attainability of this dream is not promised, and rather than a dream, one could just be pursuing a destructive illusion. The American Dream is highlighted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, illustrated as an alluring ideal that could deviate into a harmful fallacy. The harm of the American dream can be associated with Gatsby and Myrtle’s deaths, both demonstrating the failure of the lower class obtaining their desired reality. Daisy and Tom help depict how the achievability of the American dream is more prevalent to those whose social status is predetermined to be higher. Therefore, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the

In the novel, Fitzgerald utilizes death to exemplify the divide between social classes in their attempt to reach the American Dream. The first death that Fitzgerald features is Myrtle’s, who is otherwise known as Tom’s mistress. On their way back from the city, Daisy is driving Gatsby’s yellow Rolls-Royce and mistaking her for Tom, Myrtle runs out into the road. Daisy fails to stop the vehicle, and “Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick dark blood with the dust” (137). In her attempt to get Tom to stop and talk to her, Myrtle is fatally hit by the car. Myrtle and her husband were from the Valley of Ashes, a location that embodies the lower class in the novel. She longed to become wealthy and leave her lower-class status behind her, and her key to doing so was Tom. Tom had everything that Myrtle had yearned for, therefore representing her version of the American Dream. In a desperate attempt to obtain her American Dream, Myrtle jumps into the road and is killed. The “dust” in the quote represents the Valley of Ashes and the permanent tie she has to the lower class. Ultimately, she was