The Great Gatsby and the American Dream, Essay Example

Introduction

In a very real sense, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby stands simultaneously as a celebration of the ‘American Dream’ and a bitter condemnation of it. This relates directly to the author’s own life experiences for, like his title character, Fitzgerald sought a vision of an American perfection which would combine the winning of the beautiful, sought-after and unobtainable girl with wealth and esteem. Like Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald accomplished this fleetingly but not in any genuinely satisfying manner, and both hero and author were compelled to face a sadness and irresolution they could never understand.

The celebratory aspect lies only in the blissful ignorance of the dreamer, and Fitzgerald does value this. He condemns more forcefully, however, precisely because of the betrayal inherent in the ignorance. Moreover, the novel sets forth a parallel dilemma in the form of characters Tom Buchanan and his mistress, Myrtle Wilson. Here, and drawn in an intentionally less grandiose fashion, a similar dream of an absolute happiness is pursued. This pursuit is more vulgar and more frantically striven for, yet it too faces a doom.

In juxtaposing these stories, and in the careful accounting of Gatsby’s methodology in achieving his dream, Fitzgerald does not endorse the ‘American dream’, as many suppose because of the tragic and elevated portrayal of Gatsby. Rather, Fitzgerald ultimately seeks to expose how the dream itself was both unworthy of the dreamer and essentially empty from the start.

Layers Within the Story

By means of the device of the affable and appealing narrator presence of Nick Carraway, we are from the start ushered into Gatsby’ world, which in essence consists of a single ambition: his contrived wealth, his home, and everything he does is in an effort to win Daisy, the girl for whom he had not been “good enough” when they were younger. As this lack is defined as poverty, Fitzgerald immediately layers dream upon dream; Gatsby has great wealth when the story begins, but he esteems it only as a means of attaining the greater dream. For Daisy, only a life of absolute and irreducible luxury is, as he perceives it, her dream. In giving this to her, he must then achieve his own.

Daisy, meanwhile, actually enjoys her dream during this courtship. Her marriage to Tom Buchanan has provided her with what she deems an essential existence, and Fitzgerald never presents this as a necessarily bitter sacrifice Daisy has made. He draws her character in such a way that, while her own romantic notions about Jay Gatsby have a fascination for her, she is never unmindful of the benefits she enjoys from her brutish husband. Furthermore, and in a heartbreaking prelude to what must come, we sense through Nick that Gatsby is both gratified and dismayed to discover that his very wealth, the offerings he so painstakingly created for her, actually have their desired effect. He sees even in her adoration of his wealth the seeds of the fatal flaw in his dream.

Meanwhile, Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan’s ambitious and vulgar mistress, embodies several ‘American dreams’ of her own, one of which is in fact Tom’s. Rich and loutish, he believes that true success for a man of his standing lies in having both wife and mistress, and he idealizes Myrtle to accommodate his vision much as Gatsby shapes Daisy into the finer girl he dreams of. At the same time, and at cross purposes, Myrtle harbors a specifically American dream of status as, eventually, Tom Buchanan’s wife. In the meantime she contents herself with outrageous displays of her protector’s devotion, crass and trivial evidences of her nearing this dream state of American prosperity and class.

The major thrust of the story and the real significance of its layering, however, lies always within Gatsby’s delusion and Daisy’s unworthiness. A poor boy who did whatever it took to get money and power, Fitzgerald makes it clear that Gatsby has the American dream we all desire and is uninterested in it. In a very real sense, Daisy does too. Yet Daisy’s failures, and even her role as the somewhat passive instigator of Jay’s dream, is both less tragic and more forgivable. As she does not have the substance to be worthy of Gatsby’s ambition, that of the perfect girl in the perfect American dream, so too are her personal struggles less commanding.

It has been argued, and substantially so, that Gatsby’s infatuation with his dream vision of Daisy echoed Fitzgerald’s own obsession, and subsequent disappointment, in his having finally achieved enough success to marry his Zelda.  Yet that, while compelling, must be regarded apart from the novel. The book is Gatsby’s, and it has a single, powerful, tragic appeal: the sadness of pursuit when the dream is empty. “Whatever the American dream has become, it’s truest contemporary representative remains Jay Gatsby…victim of his own High Romantic, Keatsian dream of love” (Bloom 5).

There was never a happy ending possible for the hero because he chased the American dream based on nothing but a conception of what it should be. To further his ends, he shaped Daisy Buchanan into the ideal female component to the dream, the beautiful and desired girl who would love him as soon as he could live up to the masculine expectations of the dream. In doing this, he utterly ignored the nature of Daisy herself. Adoring her, he objectified her into a piece of the puzzle. She was to be the cornerstone of all his ambition, yes, and his financial and social successes were all had for the higher purpose of securing her. She was never, however, actually real to him as a woman.

Critics have asserted that Gatsby dies heroically because he never lives to see the folly of his dream. Yet Fitzgerald’s real artistry lies in the subtle exposition of Gatsby’s incomprehension as his contact with Daisy increasingly baffles him. He does hold onto his dream until his death, yet the reader strongly senses, even in Gatsby’s most intimate moments with Daisy, the awareness of the emptiness of the dream dawning upon him. The real unhappiness for Gatsby, as the reader and he himself comes to see, will be in the true fruition of his American dream.

Work Cited

Bloom, H. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Infobase Publishing, 2010. Print.