The American Dream is based on the idea that an individual can achieve success regardless of social class, race, or religion just by working hard enough. Frequently, “success” is equated with the independent, self-reliant person can have a great life. In “The Great Gatsby”, Fitzgerald critiques and examines Gatsby’s particular idealism of the American Dream in the 1920’s. Fitzgerald is examining society’s failure to fulfill its potential more than he is glamorizing the 1920’s. What Fitzgerald really seems to be criticizing in the novel, is not the American Dream itself but the corruption of the American Dream.
The novel examines the varieties of the American Dream. It is possible to see Gatsby as a tragic figure, and the epitome of idealism and innocence who strives for purpose and meaning in the scary chaotic world. Fitzgerald introduces the theme of underlying chaos early in the novel when the powerful Tom Buchanan declares, “Civilization’s going to pieces” (12: c. 1). Although Fitzgerald is sketchy (on purpose) about the details of Gatsby’s sudden rise, the reader does know that he was a poor boy from the Midwest without inherited wealth or family connections who succeeded in obtaining a fancy house in West Egg from where he stages lavish parties for people he doesn’t know. With wealth comes the opportunity to reinvent his identity, which is – in some ways inspired by the passage: “single green light, minute and far away” (21: c. 1): This is the house of Daisy Buchanan, whom Gatsby had loved before the war but who marries the wealthy Tom Buchanan. Gatsby is the self-made man, who represents the “new money” that lives in West Egg, whereas the Buchanans represent the system of values maintained by generational wealth. Although both groups are in the same class, and equally wealthy, the differences cause social status issues. People who are “new money” are seen by “old money” as showy and overly extravagant. Gatsby, who gained his wealth through illegal means, is never fully accepted by people like the Buchanans. All that matters for Gatsby is the future achieving his goal of reclaiming Daisy. That is part of the power of the American Dream—the irrelevance of the past. A sort of fabricated history is just as useful as a truthful history. So Gatsby constructs permanent lies that he doesn’t even bother to cloak in a shred of reality. For instance, when he decides to convince Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator, that he isn’t a “nobody,” Gatsby mentions that he’s the “son of some wealthy people in the Middle West … but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years” (65: c. 4).
However, Fitzgerald explores more than the failure of the American dream—he is more concerned with its total corruption. Gatsby has not achieved his wealth through honest hard work, but through bootlegging and crime. His money is not simply ‘new’ money—it is dirty money, earned through dishonesty and crime. Later in the novel, the reader learns that Gatsby’s education at Oxford wasn’t part of a family tradition, Gatsby’s went there briefly because it was part of a program for American soldiers following World War I. As Nick observes, Gatsby gives new meaning to the phrase “the self-made man”: “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself” (98: c. 6). So Gatsby is indeed new money. The idealism that evident Gatsby’s constant aspirations helps us to understand what Fitzgerald saw as the basis for the American character. Gatsby is definitely a believer in the American Dream of self-made success. He has not only made up an entire new persona for himself, but he has also succeeded both financially and – at least seemingly, socially. In the middle of the drunk people at his party, Gatsby is “standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes” (50: c. 3) At the end of the novel, Gatsby will also be all alone at his own funeral. Fitzgerald uses the death of Gatsby to comment on the change of interpretation of The American dream, that once was a belief in self-reliance and hard work has become what Nick Carraway calls “the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty” (98: c. 6). All in all, the energy that might have gone into the pursuit of noble goals has been channeled into the pursuit of power and pleasure, and a very showy, but ultimately empty, form of success is what Gatsby represent.
In addition, Gatsby makes Daisy Buchanan the sole focus of his belief in the marvelous future. His previously varied aspirations that is mentioned in the book when Gatsby’s father shows Nick detailing his son’s resolutions to improved himself are sacrificed to Gatsby’s single-minded obsession with Daisy. Even Gatsby realized when he first kissed Daisy that once he “forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God” (110: c. 6). Finally, five years later, Gatsby reunites with Daisy, takes her on a tour of his beautiful mansion, and displays his collection of shirts. Significantly, that great expectation to the afternoon produces not bliss but only disappointment. We hear about Gatsby’s illusion of daisy through Nick’s observations: “As I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.” (95: C.5) As the novel unfolds, Gatsby seems to realize that he has created an ideal for Daisy to live up to, a great expectation just like he did with his own identity. He remains committed to her, even after she was driving careless and ended up murdering Myrtle Wilson. Only his own needless death at the hands of Mr. Wilson ends Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy.
In conclusion, what Fitzgerald seems to be criticizing in The Great Gatsby is not the American Dream itself but the corruption of the American Dream. What was once a belief in self-reliance and hard work has has been channeled into the pursuit of power and pleasure, and a very showy, but ultimately empty, form of success. Gatsby’s dream can be identified with America herself with its emphasis on the inherent goodness within people, youth, vitality, and a magnanimous openness to life itself. With the destruction of Gatsby, Fitzgerald shows his message of the novel—the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.