The American Dream

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald gives a behind the scenes look into the lives of a small group of people living the 1920’s. Fitzgerald tells the story through a young man named Nick Carraway. Nick moves to New York in the summer of 1922. He rents a house in the West Egg district of Long Island. This area is populated by the “new rich”, a group who have made their money too recently to have built social connections. These people are prone to to show garish displays of wealth. Nick’s neighbor is a man named Jay Gatsby. He is very mysterious and lives in a huge Gothic mansion, in which every Saturday he throws an extravagant party.

Unlike the other people of West Egg, Nick attended Yale and has social connections in East Egg, a more classy area of Long Island home to the conventional upper class. Nicks goes to East Egg to have dinner with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan and her husband, Tom, who was a classmate of Nick’s at Yale. Tom and Daisy introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, a beautiful young woman.  They begin a romantic relationship. Soon Nick learns from Jordan that Tom has a lover, Myrtle Wilson. She lives in the Valley of Ashes, which is an industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City. Not long after this discovery Nick travels to New York with Tom and Myrtle, where Tom keeps an apartment there specifically for the affair.  While there at the apartment, Myrtle begins to taunt tom about Daisy. Tom losses it and breaks her nose.                                                                                                                                

Later into the summer, Nick is invited to one of Gatsby famous parties. When he meets Gatsby, Nick is surprised to see a charming young man with an English accent, who calls everyone “old sport”. Nick learns through Jordan that Gatsby knew Daisy in Louisville and fell deeply in love with her and still is in love with her. Nick is asked by Gatsby to arrange a meeting so he and Daisy can reconnect. After what started to be an awkward reunion, they reestablished their connection and their affair began.

After only a short time, Tom becomes increasingly suspicious of Daisy and Gatsby’s relationship. At a luncheon, Tom realizes that Gatsby loves Daisy. He is deeply outraged even though, he too is involved in an affair of his own.  He forces that whole group to take a drive into New York City. Tom confronts Gatsby in a suite at the Plaza and then tells his wife that Gatsby is a criminal; his self-made fortune having come from  bootlegging alcohol and other illegal activities.  Daisy chooses Tom over Gatsby but then Tom forces Daisy to drive home with Gatsby, possibly attempting to prove that Gatsby can’t hurt him.

When Tom, Nick and Jordan drive through the valley of ashes on their way home, they discover that Gatsby’s car has hit and killed Myrtle. They rush back to Long Island and Nick learns from Gatsby that Daisy had been driving when Myrtle was hit. Gatsby loves Daisy so much; he intends to take to blame. The next day Tom tells George, Myrtle’s husband, that Gatsby was driving the car. George concludes that whoever was driving the car must have been Daisy’s lover. He goes to Gatsby’s house and finds Gatsby in his pool. George fatally shoots Gatsby, and then turns the gun on himself.

Nick holds a small funeral for Gatsby. He then ends his relationship with Jordan and moves back to the Midwest to escape the disgust he feels for the people who surrounded Gatsby’s life and the repulsion he feels for the emptiness and decay of all morals in the lives of the wealthy. Nick reveals that just as Gatsby’s dream of loving Daisy was corrupted by money and dishonestly, so has the American dream been corrupted by the pursuit of wealth. Even though Gatsby was able to transform his dream into reality, the era of dreaming, both Gatsby’s and the American dream, is over.

The American dream was all about discovery, individualism and the pursuit of happiness. However, in this novel, it is corrupted by easy money and the absence of social values. Gatsby’s dream of loving Daisy was first ruined by their differing social classes. He then resorts to crime to make enough money to elevate his social standings to impress her.

Americans give meaning to America through their dreams. Similarly, Gatsby infuses Daisy with an idealized perfection that she neither possesses nor really reserves. Gatsby’s dream is dashed by the unworthiness of its object, just as the American dream is ruined but the unworthiness of its object, which would be the pleasure and money. Gatsby longs to re-create the past- his time with Daisy in Louisville- but just as the 1920s Americans fruitlessly seek an era in which their dreams still have value, he is incapable of doing so. When Gatsby’s dream collapses and he is killed, all Nick can do is move back to Minnesota where American values have not been lost.