Gatsby PaperEssay Preview: Gatsby PaperReport this essayThere comes a time in every persons life when they must decide if living out their dream is worth it. Some may realize their dreams are unrealistic, and they must find something more tangible to accomplish, while some stop at nothing to achieve what they have always dreamed about. When it comes to the American Dream, many people have a similar issue with deciding if it is really worth it in the end. What if all the longing for success and wealth leads to personal destruction? In the case of F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, three characters find themselves in a position in which their American Dream has caused them pain, when they could have longed for something more in reach. Throughout the novel, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, and Myrtle Wilson all strive for personal success, defined by love, happiness, and wealth. However, all three characters choose to go down the road of no return, in which their dreams have ultimately caused them disaster.
Myrtle Wilsons eventually fatal dream is to no longer be the wife of a man who isnt “fit to lick [her] shoe,” (page 34). She dreams of escaping her poor, filthy life with George and desires a new one in which Tom is her only lover and financial supporter. Although “neither of them can stand the person theyre married to,” Tom still has Daisy by his side, which makes Myrtles dream of a fabulously wealthy life with Tom nothing but an intangible fantasy (page 33). The American Dream is the goal of one day being successful, and in Myrtles case, financially stable. Myrtles American Dream is far from reach, and because she decides it is a dream worth following, she eventually gets herself hurt–literally. In an instance in which Myrtle sees Jordan in a car with Tom and believes it is Daisy, her eyes are “wide with jealous terror,” (page 125). She wants Tom for herself and feels such envy toward Daisy that it eventually drives her mad, and while in a fight with George, she runs into the road and “her life [is] extinguished” (page 137). Instead of realizing the impossibility of being Toms one and only girl, Myrtle goes crazy and faces the fatal consequences of her American Dream.
Daisy Buchanan has a similar American Dream to Myrtles because she, too, longs for wealth. Throughout the novel, Daisy demonstrates shallowness, and, as Gatsby says, “her voice is full of money” (page 120). It seems that her priorities lie where there is the most wealth, which ends up hurting Daisy in the end. In her youth, Daisy was “so engrossed” and in love with Jay Gatsby, but her shallowness led her to forget him and marry “Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Lousville ever knew before” (page 75). In essence, Daisy is a social climber, and her American Dream is to live in wealth and prosperity. She decides to live her dream and marry someone richer than Gatsby,
”. In short, she has no American dream, and it is her will to do so that has led her to marrying Gatsby. This marriage, unlike the “American Dream” of hers, is about money, not prosperity. And this is where the “American Dream” of Tom Buchanan gets a whole lot harder to understand. The American Dream is more about wealth than money per se. Wealth and abundance don’t have to be mutually exclusive, as Gatsby’s “American Dream” demands.
Some authors (such as George W. Bush and Martin Luther King Jr ) have argued as much, that there is no American dream that “wages” that much. But this is a mistake. There, money is not “the true love of the earth.” When you go into a good deal of an American dream, it doesn’t have to be about money. It only has to be about who you are (a person of money) and who you will be (a person who doesn’t have the means to love you, which is a human need). An American Dream needs a human need (this is what John Locke defined as the “good of the soul,” but it is a human need in many senses).
In my previous essays, I have argued for money being the key concept in every American dream. We should not ignore that money is a basic human feeling, right? Well, money is the essential ingredient to every single American Dream. For example, a rich man can raise a family by himself; but rich people don’t want to raise children from poverty (yet). In fact, this idea of a rich man as family member is a pretty old one, and it’s been around for as long as human beings have believed in human family ties. So, for all we know how it works, the family doesn’t have to be of any real importance when it comes to the way we conceive of ourselves, our children, and our future.
Yet, let’s not forget that when money is the primary social stimulus, many Americans have a kind of selfishness that leads them to believe that their future is the product of their will. They believe, for example, that the state of the world will magically give us all freedom. In a world on where many people have never earned the same kind of riches as us, this will have an impact only if it is used to reward selfworth. And if people think that this makes them more self-absorbed than we do (that is, if we believe ourselves to be so dependent on wealth that we believe that it is our responsibility to make this happen), it probably doesn’t have an effect on any