The Great Gatsby & the American Dream Essay Example
The Great Gatsby and the American Dream
The Great Gatsby is an interesting and thought-provoking novel by the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald that sets to explore important and complex social themes such as the hollowness of the upper class and the characteristics and decline of the American Dream during the prosperous years preceding the Great Depression. The Great Gatsby is presented at the surface as a thwarted love story between a man, Jay Gatsby, and a woman, Daisy Buchanan. However, the main theme of the novel goes beyond this and comprises a larger, and indeed less romantic, social context. Furthermore, despite the novel's setting in New York during the summer of 1922 it is still a representation of America throughout the whole decade of the 1920s. The Great Gatsby serves in this context to particularly highlight the disintegration of the American Dream during a period of unprecedented wealth and material prosperity. Yet, this access to wealth comes in the novel at the expense of social and moral values as is clear through the dominance of greed and the empty pursuit of pleasure among the characters. The decline and corruption of the American Dream is epitomized through Gatsby’s lifestyle that involves wild parties and loud jazz music every night. This lifestyle is symbolic of the unrestrained, and hence corrupted, pursuit of money at the expense of any other goals and values in life. Fitzgerald's focus on this theme in the novel is in its turn the outcome of his poor background that led him to become fascinated with the concept of wealth and its surrounding ramifications. In short, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a novel that explores the social sphere that led to the decadence and corruption of the American Dream.
The story develops when Nick meets Jay Gatsby while attending one of his famous parties. Gatsby comes strongly over as a young man who tries too hard to appear classier than he is. For instance, he fakes an English accent to
The Great Gatsby is an interesting and thought-provoking novel by the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald that sets to explore important and complex social themes such as the hollowness of the upper class and the characteristics and decline of the American Dream during the prosperous years preceding the Great Depression. The Great Gatsby is presented at the surface as a thwarted love story between a man, Jay Gatsby, and a woman, Daisy Buchanan. However, the main theme of the novel goes beyond this and comprises a larger, and indeed less romantic, social context. Furthermore, despite the novel's setting in New York during the summer of 1922 it is still a representation of America throughout the whole decade of the 1920s. The Great Gatsby serves in this context to particularly highlight the disintegration of the American Dream during a period of unprecedented wealth and material prosperity. Yet, this access to wealth comes in the novel at the expense of social and moral values as is clear through the dominance of greed and the empty pursuit of pleasure among the characters. The decline and corruption of the American Dream is epitomized through Gatsby’s lifestyle that involves wild parties and loud jazz music every night. This lifestyle is symbolic of the unrestrained, and hence corrupted, pursuit of money at the expense of any other goals and values in life. Fitzgerald's focus on this theme in the novel is in its turn the outcome of his poor background that led him to become fascinated with the concept of wealth and its surrounding ramifications. In short, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a novel that explores the social sphere that led to the decadence and corruption of the American Dream.
The story develops when Nick meets Jay Gatsby while attending one of his famous parties. Gatsby comes strongly over as a young man who tries too hard to appear classier than he is. For instance, he fakes an English accent to