American Dream and Great Gatsby Essay

The american dream is the idea that all americans are equal and have an equal opportunity to achieve success. The American Dream is portrayed in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald in many ways and in some ways how it fails. In the book the american dream is separated in three ways. One is the East egg where it's old money and where people haven't worked for anything because their money has been inherited. In the West egg people are known for their new money. Their money has been acquired from working hard themselves to achieve their goals. The last way the American Dream is portrayed in the book is by the valley of ashes where people are working towards their dream or just working and don't have goals.

Jay Gatsby is a dapper fellow of new money. He made all of his money himself through the prohibition of alcohol. The man is an entrepreneur. He was from North Dakota and was a clammer and then he came across a man named Dan Cody who taught him how to be a gentleman. Gatsby was cheated out of the man's will and was left with nothing yet again. He then went into The Great War and became “an oggsford man”. Although people's usual dream is to make it his is to have Daisy back again. Supposedly all he's done is to get her back.

"It was a strange coincidence," I said.

"But it wasn't a coincidence at all."

"Why not?"

"Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay." (4.137-140)

Here you can see that he is in love with Daisy and that that is his dream. Gatsby goes through the trouble of throwing massive parties and buying a huge house to impress Daisy.

Nick is also living in the land of the new money, West Egg. Although he is living in an old grounds keepers house Nick has moved from Minnesota to get into the bonds business. Nick attended Yale with Tom Buchanan. The fact that he attended Yale says that he comes from a family with at least some money. Throughout the book Nick doesn't seem to have a dream. At the end of the book he realizes that the american dream is a thing in our past and that Gatsbys American Dream was the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. It could be said that his dream is to have a friendship.

“I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. [...] Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed,