The American Dream has attracted millions to the coasts of the United States in search of an improved life for themselves and their loved ones. The idea that an individual can achieve their goals through persistence and hard work has been a concept that has driven both Americans and immigrants to work for centuries, yet the shortcomings of the dream that frequently occur are generally not commercialized to the public. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald both illustrate the pursuit of the American Dream, along with its harsh realities. The main characters in the works, Willy Loman and Jay Gatsby both strive for a goal out of their reach, setting themselves up for failure from the beginning. The protagonists’ inability to separate ideal and real circumstances in both Miller and Fitzgerald’s works highlight the corruption of the American Dream, ultimately showing how the pursuit of a dream founded on artificial illusions will lead to tragedy.
Ignoring the rational circumstances of his unattainable American Dream, James Gatz embodies a counterfeit form of himself as Jay Gatsby in attempt to rekindle his love with Daisy Buchanan. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby comes back from war and sees that his first love Daisy is married to Tom Buchanan, a wealthy man. From this, Gatsby gets the false impression that he will be able to get Daisy back if he works to build up his societal status the same as the Buchanan’s. Despite Gatsby being a college dropout and a son of two poor farmers from the Midwest, he takes the time to build up enough materialistic wealth to prove to Daisy “that he is a person from much the same stratum as herself that he is fully able to take care of her” (82). With the repudiation of Daisy’s love and stable marriage with Tom, Gatsby moves into a mansion across the bay from her in the West Egg in hopes that she will come back to him. Desperate to reunite with Daisy, Gatsby purposely throws lavish parties just in case she happens to attend one of them. He thinks that if she sees his success through his materialistic wealth, she will leave her current lover and fall in love with him again. His disbelief of Daisy and Tom’s love is further shown through his actions as he repeatedly lies to his guests about his past, saying how he is “a son of some wealthy people [from San Francisco] all dead now and [how attending Oxford] is a family tradition” (34). Gatsby understands that Daisy recognizes success through status. Not only does he misrepresent his educational and family background, he is willing to make up lies about his parents and their death. This reflects his efforts to be accepted among the materialistic society of the Roaring Twenties and most importantly, Daisy Buchanan. It further reveals his denial to accept the truth about his real past of growing up underprivileged, which is something that the East Eggers like Daisy are unfamiliar and distant about.
Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman parallels the attitude of Jay Gatsby as he lies and fabricates an unconventional version of himself and his sons in an effort to attain his impractical American Dream of being a successful businessman. As the head of the household, Willy is responsible for making the money to pay back the loans for the house, along with the costs of maintenance. When Willy is talking to his wife about the sales he obtains throughout his trip as a salesman, he initially tells her that “[he] did five hundred gross in Providence and seven hundred gross in Boston” (11). As the conversation continues and she starts calculating his exact commission value, he hesitantly starts changing back the numbers to the real values of two hundred gross throughout the whole trip. Willy envisions himself shadowing the life of Dave Singleman, an acclaimed businessman that “drummed merchandise in thirty-one states” (14). He is incapable of fulfilling this dream given the circumstances that he is sixty-three years old, hasn’t been able to settle on a stable career, and barely gets enough money from the accomplished people around him to pay back his loans. In spite of his obvious struggles, he constantly lies to his surroundings, even his wife, about his success to make himself look and feel more important than he really is. Throughout the novel, it is also evident that Willy enforces his American Dream upon his two sons Happy and Biff. When Willy runs into his neighbor’s son Bernard, he lies and tells him that “Bill Oliver, [a] very big sporting-goods man wants Biff very badly” (19) when in reality, Bill didn’t remember him when Biff goes to ask for a loan. Despite the fact that both Happy and Biff gradually accept that they aren’t fit to become businessmen like their father wants them to be, Willy refuses to believe the truth and persistently tells others about their accomplishments as businessmen. He is insecure about his current life that he replaces it with noticeable lies and pretends to be extremely arrogant to cover it up. Although Willy and Gatsby hold two different interpretations of the American Dream, one involving love and the other involving success in business, they both use dishonesty to make themselves look like they are on a better state of mind than they realistically are.
As the impracticality of the American Dream grows more apparent, Gatsby and Willy’s blindness towards reality grows as well, resulting in misleading optimism towards their chances of achieving it. Throughout both novels, Willy and Gatsby experience vivid flashbacks to a point where it is difficult differentiating the past and the present. In Willy’s case, he intermittently eludes to the past moments that brings him happiness. At times it goes to moments where he is proud of his sons, talking to his brother, or having an affair with a woman that shows appreciation to him by saying how “[he makes her] laugh, [he’s] so sweet, [and how she thinks he’s] a wonderful man” (13). These flashbacks act as an escape from reality for Willy, a place where he is able to take back every aspect of life he misses and fix his mistakes. As time passes, Willy is unable to control his illusions to a point where he is caught by others drifting off talking to himself. This is similar to Gatsby’s experience with Daisy as he keeps getting recollections of their moments together before he left to help with the war. Although Gatsby’s flashbacks are not as extreme as Willy’s, it also acts as a way of ignoring the reality and the impracticality that comes with such absurd goals. There are multiple occurrences where he goes back in time to when he and Daisy were in love, which makes him want “to go back to Louisville and be married from her house just as if it were five years ago” (59). These flashbacks work as a temporary getaway from the harsh reality, however, has a negative impact on the characters as they come back to the present time with high expectations and receive the opposite response. Through the repetition of pleasant memories, both Gatsby and Willy develop a false hope that the American Dream they’re trying to achieve is possible.
The failure to differentiate realistic and idealistic situations result for both Willy and Gatsby to face tragic endings to their lives and their American Dreams. Even after his sons confess to him that they aren’t fit to be apart of the business world, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman is unable to accept him and his sons’ fate of not being successful businessmen. He dies by faking a car accident and commits suicide in order to provide his sons with his life insurance. Believing that his death is worth more than his life, he never let go of the wrong idea that the only reason his sons aren’t succeeding in their own businesses is that of the lack of money. Jay Gatsby also faces death in The Great Gatsby, but it is not self-inflicted or expected like Willy’s death. Gatsby gets shot by George Wilson, the husband of whom his car hit and killed while driving with Daisy. The misunderstanding that Gatsby is the driver who hit Mr. Wilson’s wife Myrtle when in reality it is Daisy, leads George to take revenge on Gatsby by killing him. Both characters ultimately aren’t able to achieve their American Dream due to their false perceptions of what they are capable of doing versus their real abilities.
If an individual’s American Dream doesn’t stay within the boundaries of achievability under the conditions they live in or face, the dream merely becomes pointless, and at times even harmful. Reflecting off of Willy and Gatsby’s experience, I believe that the American Dream is simply unattainable because of the disproportionately high standards children and parents hold among themselves. To start off, I think that there can’t be a set definition or phrase to describe what the American Dream is, as it could mean drastically different things to people depending on the circumstances they are under. For instance, the invention of the Levitt houses in the late 1940’s raises the standard of living and adds home ownership into one of the elements crucial towards achieving the American Dream. Similarly, the rapid expansion of technology and societal norms over the past few decades raised the overall standard of living dramatically. As a result, the exposure of information through social media platforms has risen significantly, people nowadays can be exposed to the world’s richest and smartest citizens by the power of their fingertips. Comparing these distinguished individuals to themselves, citizens hold and aim for such high expectations towards what they want to achieve in their lives. Our generation today is especially picky in this manner as we are never satisfied with the accomplishments that we already have, but always crave for more, better, and bigger. This shift in perspective compared to the desires of the 1900’s gives me the idea that citizens are now reaching for something that they have no chance of fulfilling, much like the American Dream that both Willy and Gatsby works and fails to achieve.
The bigger the expectation one has for themselves and their loved ones, the bigger the let-down is when they can’t accomplish it. Not being an American citizen has given me a perspective towards the American Dream that the majority of students in my classes aren’t able to have. Although I am originally a Korean citizen, I have lived in four countries throughout my life, one obviously being the United States. The reason my dad decided to move here back in 2008 reflects the ideals of the American Dream that immigrants typically have. At the time, he believed that as I grow older, living in such a huge country like the U.S. will give me more opportunities and experience, regardless of what passion or interest I have. Looking back at this belief with the two works we read in class, I feel like my dad did not pursue a dream that is founded on fake illusions like Willy Loman and Jay Gatsby but used only real circumstances. He didn’t bring my family to the U.S. having too high of expectations, but with the understanding that the nation has a much larger population than any other place my family has moved to and is a constantly transforming society. I can agree with my dad on this belief as the culture in the U.S. is much more open towards the interests one might have. Living in Japan is much different compared to life in the United States. Japanese culture is much more uptight and strict towards what a child is expected of doing in their futures. The flexibility that children have towards choosing what they want to do in life is something that I believe children here take for granted, as I remember growing up in Tokyo where a large number of parents of my closest friends had already decided on what they were going to pursue when they are older.