Literary Analysis Of The Great Gatsby

In The Great Gatsby, an American classic depicting what has become known as “the roaring 20’s,” F. Scott Fitzgerald uses several literary elements and plot details to show the depreciation of the American Dream through the narrator’s opinion of the state of the American dream, the lives of those who pursue it, and the result of their pursuit. Fitzgerald defines the state of the American dream through comparisons of what it had been to what he currently sees it to be in the high class society of New York and where the characters grew up in the West. The lives of these people, namely the narrator Nick Carraway, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and Gatsby, are described both as they pursue the new American Dream only to show their lives as unfulfilled
While Gatsby’s motivating factor was his undying faith in the future, Tom’s motivation stems from frustration at his inability to quench his thirst for more. Nick describes him as “one of those men who reached such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax” (p.3.) After a successful college football career, Tom ceaselessly searched for something that was constantly just unattainable. While he could have found a simplistic happiness in his highly comfortable wealth, beautiful wife, and child, he took to searching for more in power as the “dominant race” and love for showering wealth on his mistresses (p.
Daisy, for example, was a lovely, likeable girl when she met Gatsby. Fitzgerald begins his description of her by making comparing her to a white flower and almost otherworldly in the crime-ridden, deceitful society she lives in. However after many years of chasing after Tom’s wanderings, Fitzgerald reveals her truer side. She reflects that she prayed her daughter would be a fool the day she was born, “a beautiful little fool…the best thing a girl can be in this life” (p. 19.) This was the most honest moment of Daisy’s life when she fleetingly came to terms that her life was not what she wanted it to be. Gatsby as well found no fulfillment in the dream of the winning Daisy through the lavish parties and wealth he presented her with. The green light that he constantly personifies as his life with Daisy was constantly a driving passion until it finally died