America - The American dream

Damned where he portrayed the hedonism, corruption and loss of ideals of

the “Lost generation”. In the same year the Fitzgeralds went to Europe and

spent some time in Paris and on the French Riviera, where Scott finished

writing The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Though regarded at his finest

work, the novel was not a commercial success and marked the beginning

of the decline of the author’s popularity. Back in the United States,

Fitzgerald started to write film scripts to pay his debts. He was by now an

alcoholic and his wife was suffering from mental instability. She spent the

rest of her life in a sanatorium until her death in a fire in 1947. In 1934

Ftzgerald published another novel, Tender in the Night. The novel tells the

story of the tormented marriage of an American psychiatrist and his

schizophrenic wife. The title is taken from a line in Keats’ Ode to a

Nightingale. It was cooly received because the tastes of the reading public

had changed with the Great Depression.

He died of a heart attack in 1940; in 1941 and in 1945 two works of his were

published: The Last Tycoon, an unfinished novel about wealth and his role

in Americal life, and The Crack-Up, a collection of essays and notes.

The Great Gatsby and the American

Dream

With the expression American Dream we intend the belief that the US is a

land of unlimited opportunities for material progress. America represents

a world of money, corruption, pleasure–hunting and social power.

Fitzgerald is critical of this dream of “success”, aware of its illusionary

nature and its disregard for the complexities of real life.

The Great Gatsby provides a study of the recurrent theme of wealth and its

role in American life. Gatsby is an enigmatic figure, a mysterious “self- 6

made man” who appears to have achieved the American dream of

immense wealth, and holds extravagant parties, open to virtually

everyone. He is successful for his naivety and illusions which are too

fragile a basis for any lasting relationship. Gatsby’s illusion is a symbol of

the life of America in the 1920s.

The Americaness of the novel is emphasized by such themes as the move

from West to East; the comparison between the romantic ideals of courage,

honour and beauty and the real world; the relationship of Gatsby’s

material achievements to the myth of “rags to riches”; the tremendous

growth of the car industry; the corrupting effects of Prohibition; the

poverty of spiritual life in America during its most hedonistic decade. Jay

Gatsby has the stature of a romantic hero who dies for his dream, but he

also embodies the self-made man who tries to recreate the past through the

power of money and is finally destroyed. Gatsby retains the original

innocence of the American Dream that reader can’t help but admire.

The description of society during the Jazz Age is extremely detailed and it

is scattered with symbolic images, like the car, which stands for the

destructive power of modern society and money. The most impressive

description is perhaps the one of “the valley of ashes”, a stretch of land full

of rubbish, waste and ashes, lying between the city and the suburb where

Gatsby lives. Gatsby’s house too is at the same time real and symbolic:

carefully described, in its various rooms and acres of garden, it celebrates

Gatsby’s luck and success during the parties, but embodies his melancholy

and loneliness when it is empty.

The most important themes of the novel are the decline of the American

Dream in the 1920s and the hollowness of the upper class. 7

The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on the 1920s in America as

a whole, in particular the disintegration of the American dream in an era of

unprecedent prosperity and material excess. Fitzgerald portrays the

1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values, evidenced in its

overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. The reckless

jubilance that led to decadent parties and wild jazz music resulted

ultimately in the corruption of the American dream, as the unrestrained

desire for money and pleasure surpassing more noble goals. When World

War I ended in 1918, the generation of young Americans who had fought

the war became intensely disillusioned, as the brutal carnage that they had

just faced made the Victorian social morality of early-twentieth-century

America seem like stuffy, empty hypocrisy. The dizzying rise of the stock

market sustained increase in the national wealth and a new found

materialism, as people began to spend and consume at unprecedented

levels. A person from any social background could, potentially, make a

fortune, but the American aristocracy scorned the newly rich industrialists

and speculators. The Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, which banned the

sale of alcohol, created a thriving underworld designed to satisfy the

massive demand for bootleg liquor among rich and poor alike. Nick and

Gatsby, both of whom fought in World War I, exhibit the new found

cosmopolitanism and cynicism that resulted from the war. The clash

between “old money” and “new money” manifests itself in the novel’s

symbolic geography: East Egg represents the established old aristocracy,

West Egg the heavly rich self-made rich. Meyer Wolfshiem and Gatsby’s

fortune symbolize the rise of organized crime and bootlegging. As

Fitzgerald saw it (and as Nick explains in Chapter IX), the American dream

was originally about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of

happiness. In the 1920s depicted in the novel, however, easy money and 8

relaxed social values have corrupted this dream, especially on the East

Coast. The main plotline of the novel reflects this assessment, as Gatsby’s

dream of loving Daisy is ruined by the difference in their respective social

statuses, his resorting to crime to make enough money to impress her, and

the rampant materialism that characterizes her lifestyle.

Places and objects in The Great Gatsby have meaning only because

characters instill them with meaning: the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg

best exemplify this idea. In Nick’s mind, the ability to create meaningful

symbols constitutes a central component of the American dream, as early

Americans invested their new nation with their own ideals and

values.Nick compares the green bulk of America rising from the ocean to

the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Just as Americans have given

America meaning through their dreams for their own lives, Gatsby instills

Daisy with a kind of idealized perfection that she neither deserves nor

possesses. Gatsby’s dream is ruined by the unworthiness of its object, just

as the American dream in the 1920s is ruined by the unworthiness of its

object—money and pleasure. Gatsby longs to re-create a vanished past, but

is incapable of doing so. When his dream crumbles, all that is left for

Gatsby to do is die; all Nick can do is move back to Minnesota, where

American values have not decayed.

The other theme, the hollowness of the upper class, represents the

sociology of wealth, how the newly minted millionaires of the 1920s differ

from and relate to the old aristocracy of the country’s richest families. The

newly rich are vulgar, gaudy, ostentatious, and lacking in social graces and

taste. Gatsby lives in a monstrously ornate mansion, wears a pink suit,

drives a Rolls-Royce, and does not pick up on subtle social signals, such as

the insincerity of the Sloanes’ invitation to lunch. The old aristocracy

possesses grace, taste, subtlety, and elegance, epitomized by the 9

Buchanans’ tasteful home and the flowing white dresses of Daisy and

Jordan Baker.What the old aristocracy possesses in taste seems to lack in

heart, they are so used to money’s ability to ease their minds that they

never worry about hurting others. The Buchanans exemplify this

stereotype when, at the end of the novel, they simply move to a new house

far away rather than condescend to attend Gatsby’s funeral. Gatsby, on the

other hand, whose recent wealth derives from criminal activity, has a

sincere and loyal heart, remaining outside Daisy’s window until four in the

morning in Chapter VII simply to make sure that Tom does not hurt her.

Gatsby’s good qualities (loyalty and love) lead to his death and the

Buchanans’ bad qualities (fickleness and selfishness) allow them to remove

themselves from the tragedy not only physically but psychologically.

In the novel there are also a lot of symbols, but the most important are the

green light, the valley of ashes and the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg.

The Green Light, situated at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock and barely

visible from Gatsby’s West Egg lawn, represents Gatsby’s hopes and

dreams for the future. Gatsby associates it with Daisy, and in Chapter I he

reaches towards it in the darkness as a guiding light to lead him to his goal.

Because Gatsby’s quest for Daisy is broadly associated with the American

dream, the green light also symbolizes that more generalized ideal. In

Chapter IX, Nick compares the green light to how America, rising out of

the ocean, must have looked to early settlers of the new nation.

First introduced in Chapter II, the Valley of Ashes, the valley’s between

West Egg and New York City, it consists of a long stretch of desolate land

created by the dumping of industrial ashes. It represents the moral and

social decay that results from the uninhibited pursuit of wealth, as the rich

indulge themselves with regard for nothing but their own pleasure. The 10

valley of ashes also symbolizes the plight of the poor, like George Wilson,

who live among the dirty ashes and which lose their vitality as a result.

The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are a pair of fading, bespectacled eyes

painted on an old advertising billboard over the valley of ashes. They may

represent God staring down upon and judging American society as a

moral wasteland, though the novel never makes this point explicitly.

Instead, throughout the novel, Fitzgerald suggests that symbols only have

meaning because characters instill them with meaning. The connection

between the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and God exists only in George

Wilson’s grief-stricken mind. This lack of concrete significance contributes

to the unsettling nature of the image. Thus, the eyes also come to represent

the essential meaninglessness of the world and the arbitrariness of the

mental process by which people invest objects with meaning. Nick

explores these ideas in Chapter VIII, when he imagines Gatsby’s final

thoughts as a depressed consideration of the emptiness of symbols and

dreams.

The passage which best explains us Gatsby’s dream is:

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes

before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster,

stretch out our arms farther. . .And then one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

These words conclude the novel and find Nick returning to the theme of

the significance of the past to dreams of the future, here represented by the

green light. He focuses on the struggle of human beings to achieve their

goals by both transcending and re-creating the past. Yet humans prove

themselves unable to move beyond the past: in the metaphoric language

used here, the current draws them backward as they row forward toward 11

the green light. This past functions as the source of their ideas about the

future (epitomized by Gatsby’s desire to re-create 1917 in his affair with

Daisy) and they cannot escape it as they continue to struggle to transform

their dreams into reality. While they never lose their optimism (“tomorrow

we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . .”), they expend all of

their energy in pursuit of a goal that moves ever farther away. This apt

metaphor characterizes both Gatsby’s struggle and the American dream

itself. Nick’s words register neither blind approval nor cynical

disillusionment but rather the respectful melancholy that he ultimately

brings to his study of Gatsby’s life.