The Great Gatsby and His American Dream

                 (Dept of Architecture, SCUT, Guangzhou 510640, PRC)
Abstract Regarded as the spokesman of the jazz times, F. Scott Fitzgerald is usually found in his works good at using conflicts to explore the origins and fate of the American dream and the related idea of the nation. Among those masterpieces the most outstanding one is the Great Gatsby.
Every great mind is compounded by the age and social circumstance he was born with, Fitzgerald is none the exception. In the Great Gatsby Fitzgerald put into the confliction he experienced which heighten the implication of the dream for individual lives: the promise and possibilities, violation and corruptions of those ideals of nationhood and personality, which are shared by the lost generation in the Jazz age, an age in which everyone was confused about how to live through it.
The 1920s saw a great boom in economy after World War One. Along with it was a new rule set in both economy and social values. Reality takes on proportions of enormity simply too vast, too horrific, for the generation to catch up with this change and to grasp the true value of existing in the world. And the young who just experienced the Great World War lost their original ethic, thus suffering from a doubt of the old moral standards. The conflicts between the old value and the new value had a great impact on Fitzgerald, which were demonstrated in the Great Gatsby as the basement of the corruption of the American dream.
On the surface, the Great Gatsby is a love story between man and woman. The meaning in the depth of the novel, however, refers to a much larger, less romantic scope. As Fitzgerald portrays the 1920s as an era in which old social and moral values decayed, evidenced in its overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. In the fiction this is represented in the reckless jubilance in Gatsby’s luxurious party which is cast every Saturday night. As unrestrained materialism set the tone of the society, America’s powerful optimism, vitality, and individualism become subordinated to the amoral pursuit of wealth. As the novel progresses and Fitzgerald deconstructs Gatsby’s self-presentation as an innocent, hopeful young man who stakes everything on his dreams, not realizing that his dreams are unworthy of him. Gatsby invest Daisy with an idealistic perfection that she cannot possibly attain in reality and pursues her so passionately that he is blinded to her limitations. His dream of Daisy origins from his young innocent age, when there’s still strong belief in pure humane moral quality and innocent love. Gatsby’s dream of Daisy disintegrating with his death and Daisy’s flee, the American dream is virtually corrupted meanwhile.
Let’s go down to the detail analysis and we’ll find that both Tom and Gatsby reflect strains in the development of American history and culture. While Tom is “a scion of the great robber barons of the Gilded Age who seize the land, gutted the forests, laid the railroads, and turned the cities into vast urban fortresses for the purpose of protecting their own moneyed interests”, he represents descendants of those early pioneers, frontiersman and later settlers who attempted to transform the Virgin Land into a New World Garden. These later empire-builders of the post-Civil War period, who were eager to replace crops with machines, set aside morality as easily and quickly as they attempted to buy up civilization. Gatsby, by contrast, a man who ” born of his Platonic conception of himself,” as Nick tells us, and “elected to be about his father’s business” is left from the beginning without anything in twentieth-century America but “a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty for him to serve”, recalls an earlier generation of American worthies who originally journeyed to these shores. In the hopes of establishing a kingdom which might conform to the Heaven, they stick on those morality standards such as individualism, exploring spirits, optimism and pursuit of happiness, all of which make up the American Dream. But after a decent period intervening between the first settlement and the establishment of the Republic, the dreams of the one had become conflicting with the success of the other. The relaxed social value as a result of unrestrained pursuit of wealth of the latter finally led to the corruption of the American dream in the times.
Gatsby is a conflicting character combined with an ideal quality and materialism. His tragedy, however, is his lack of any critical ability to distinguish his spiritual ideal from the material conditions through which he must realize his dream, which is quiet the similar case as Fitzgerald himself and the whole generation he represents. As is the usual case, when a new economical value emerges, the social value should find its compatible way to adapt to the change. Dealt well, the American Dream should find its way to live on.
Works cited
[1]F.Scott Fitzgerald.” The Great Gatsby”. Scribner,1995
[2]Henry James. “Letter to F•S•Fitzgerald, December 31, 1925”in EdmundWilson. The Crack-up, New York: New Directions, 1945
[3]Brian Phillips. “Today’s Most Popular Study Guides —— The Great Gatsby” [H].Spark Notes LLC,2003
[4]Scott Fitzgerald. This Side of Paradise [M]. New York:Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920.