Discussing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and how the storyline represents the making and breaking of the American Dream.
This paper discusses how, through Fitzgerald’s cynical writing style, the reader is presented with the idea that the American Dream is a fairy tale and is unattainable. The writer provides a brief summary of the story and explains how Gatsby fought his whole life to try and achieve certain things, but was unsuccessful – love, wealth and recognition.
“One of the great American classic novels is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in which Jay Gatsby relentlessly pursues the love and adoration of Daisy Buchanan, who had scorned him five years earlier because of his lack of money and status. While romantic love might seem the theme at first glance as the novel unfolds, it becomes clearer that the central theme tying the novel together is the decline and eventual destruction of the American Dream. It is this dream or the lack thereof that haunts the pages of The Great Gatsby. Contributing factors to the demolition of the dream are excess, greed and the confusion of wealth and power in place of success and achievement. In direct correlation with the loss of hope, the characters search in vain for a sense of fulfillment in trivial matters. Fitzgerald ultimately presents the American Dream as a fairy tale, a dream that ceases to exist to the jaded, cynical viewers such as Fitzgerald himself.”