Great Gatsby

The main motif of The Great Gatsby is the slow deterioration of the American Dream. Fitzgerald argues that the American Dream no longer denotes the ambition to achieve a certain goal. Instead he feels that it has become corrupt and materialistic. In the novel, Fitzgerald uses Jay Gatsby’s life to symbolize the death of the American dream.

According to Fitzgerald, in order to achieve the American dream, one must be determined and optimistic. With these virtues, one can succeed at many things. This is apparent in the young Gatsby, James Gatz. As a young adult, Gatsby scrupulously plans out his future in his journal hoping one day he will become a great man. When Gatsby father shows the journal to Nick, he declares, "'Jimmy was bound to get ahead”(182). Gatsby’s journal demonstrates his constant struggle for self-improvement, which is exemplary of a true American dream. His dream, at this point, is still noble and righteous, and, therefore, the American dream continues to live on. Unfortunately, due to Gatsby’s obsession with wealth and power, his dream has become corrupt resulting in the slow corrosion of the American dream.

Fitzgerald feels that people’s obsession with riches and power are the leading cause of th

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Gatsby and the other characters of the novel act as mere vessels for the author's true story: the American Dream, once a pure and mighty ideal, has been degraded and buried by the dehumanizing lust for money. What if I did tell him? That fellow [Gatsby] had it coming to him'. Nick later conjectures that Gatsby, at the moment of his death, "must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. Afterwards he kept looking at the child with surprise. "

At this point, all of Daisy is stripped of all her charm and beauty; nothing remains but the coarse lure of wealth.

Toward the end of the novel, Fitzgerald creates a sense of utter hopelessness and despair through the introduction of Tom and Daisy's child, the murder of Gatsby, and Wilson's suicide. The first hint of the impending tragedy can be found in the person of the Buchanans' daughter, whom Daisy nauseatingly refers to as "Bles-sed pre-cious. " The dream is now utterly lost and can never be resurrected at least not in its original, its purest form. High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl. Tom scoffs at Nick: "'I told him [George] the truth. It was full of money- that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it.

Approximate Word count = 1151
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

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