The Disillusion of American Dream
–on The Great Gatsby
Introduction
The Great Gatsby was published in 1922 by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, and named after his ancestor Francis Scott Key, the author of The Star-Spangled Banner. In the World War I, Fitzgerald became a second lieutenant, and was stationed at Camp Sheridan, in Montgomery, Alabama. There he met and fell in love with a wild seventeen-year-old beauty named Zelda Sayre. Zelda finally agreed to marry him, but her overpowering desire for wealth, fun, and leisure led her to delay their wedding until he could prove a success. With the publication of This Side of Paradise in 1920, Fitzgerald became a literary sensation, earning enough money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him. Having become a celebrity, Fitzgerald fell into a wild, reckless life-style of parties and decadence, while desperately trying to please Zelda by writing to earn money. As the giddiness of the Roaring Twenties dissolved into the bleakness of the Great Depression, however, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism, which hampered his writing. He published Tender Is the Night in 1934, and sold short stories to The Saturday Evening Post to support his lavish lifestyle. In 1937, he left for Hollywood to write screenplays, and in 1940, while working on his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four.
Many of these events from Fitzgerald’s life appear in his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby. At first glance, the novel appears to be a simple love story, but further examination reveals Fitzgerald's masterful scrutiny of American society during the 1920s and the corruption of the American dream. It was a story told about a man named Gatsby, who was from a poor family in the Middle West. During World War I, he met a beautiful and wealthy girl named Daisy .From then on, he began to dedicate all his life to Daisy. But when he came back from the war, Daisy had married to Tom, a wealthy man. Gatsby was very depressed and started to amass a great deal of wealth through illegal means. He devoted himself to acquiring possessions and throwing parties that he believed will enable him to win Daisy’s love. But his dream was ruined by the reality and he lost his life for Daisy at last. It was a tragedy of the age.
Summary
The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of this period, in which the American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to the nation. Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1919), made millionaires out of bootleggers, and an underground culture of revelry sprang up. Sprawling private parties managed to elude police notice, and “speakeasies”—secret clubs that sold liquor—thrived. The chaos and violence of World War I left America in a state of shock, and the generation that fought the war turned to wild and extravagant living to compensate. The staid conservatism and timeworn values of the previous decade were turned on their ear, as money, opulence, and exuberance became the order of the day. Through vivid descriptions of the tragic fate of Gatsby, the book fully shows the disillusion of American dream.
Comments
There is a dream, deeply rooted in every American’s heart, that the great great grandfathers of all Americans have been contemplating and seeking from the very beginning of the May Flower, extremely prevailing in the American society after the World War I. The American dream, is a belief that America is a land of infinite possibilities in which everyone, no matter where he is from or which class he is in, will be able to achieve the ideal of a better life as long as he makes a hard struggle by himself, that is, people have to work through their own hard work, courage, creativity and determination to move towards Prosperity, rather than rely on specific social classes and other assistance. Thus the dream leads Americans to believe that perspiration can make everything.
It is definitely a correct value to emphasis one’s own struggle to achieve success. However, in the process of rapid industrialization, with the money-orienting, power-pursuing minds springing up, the dream was gradually losing its nature and most people did not adhere to its guidelines any more, as a result of which, the American dream turned out to be a pursuit for money and the American society thus became a world where money took precedence over moral integrity. Americans began to try every means to make money and indulge themselves in endless luxurious enjoyment at the cost of moral bankruptcy.
Fortunately, we had people with keen insight who saw the reality much more clearly than the blind masses. Having been aware of the chaos in the society, they pointed out that many versions of the dream equated prosperity with happiness and that happiness might not always be that simple. These critics suggested that the American Dream might always remain tantalizingly out of reach for some Americans, making it more like a cruel joke than a genuine dream. Francis Scott Fitzgerald was one of those. Although he himself was a product of American Dream, for he fell into a wild reckless lifestyle of parties and decadence with her wife after becoming a celebrity by writing, he could still remain sober-minded to measure everything by strict ethical standard. Just under such a circumstance, The Great Gatsby came into being. As the best work of Fitzgerald aimed at mirroring the reality, the book vividly and truthfully portrayed the popularity and disillusion of American Dream at that age.
The novel mainly tells us the story of Gatsby by Nick’s tone. By using a series of skillful writing techniques, especially symbolism, the author connected the present, the past and the future together, not only vividly describing Gatsby’s persistent pursuit for his dream and the final tragedy of him, but also depicting a set of other characters with distinct personalities. All of them—the embodiment of the “Jazz Age”, served as significant roles to completely interpret the so-called American Dream and its disillusionment.
As the protagonist of the story, Gatsby really had the most impressing experience. Born in an average peasant family which lived by fields throughout generations in the Middle West, Gatsby determined to create a big future at a very early age for he always had some resolves and made lots of schedules when he was a child. During the war, he encountered the pretty girl Daisy who came from a wealthy family and was deeply fascinated by her charm. Gatsby, then suddenly realized that Daisy was definitely his dream for years, which turned out to be an important turning point in his life. He started dedicating all his life to Daisy. However, unexpectedly, when he returned from the battle field overseas, Daisy had married to Tom Buchanans, a dude from an enormously wealthy family, which firmly convinced Gatsby that only money could help him win Daisy back and get what he wanted. Therefore, with full-hearted passion for Daisy and his lifelong dream, he came to the east of America, an extremely prosperous holy land, where he accumulated great wealth through illegal means in the five years .Then opposite Daisy’s home he bought the villa-Gatsby Mansion in which he threw lavish parties hosting hundreds of people day and night, in the hope that Daisy would visit the parties some day. An occasional opportunity let Gatsby know that Daisy was Nick’s cousin. So with the help of Nick, Gatsby finally met Daisy again and they had often made date since then, in the process of which Daisy’s vanity, vulgarness and selfishness were gradually exposed to Gatsby. Despite having realized that Daisy’s voice was full of money and his pink dream had been broken, he still retained some illusion about Daisy. Then one day when Daisy was in a drunken driving in Gatsby’s car, she caused an accident that killed Tom’s mistress. After the accident, instead of bearing the responsibility herself, she was cruel enough to plan a plot with Tom and put the blame on Gatsby, which led to the result that the victim’s husband suddenly burst into Gatsby’s house and shot him. The more chilling thing was that Daisy did not give Gatsby a glance after his death or even a call. So far, Gatsby’s dream was completely disillusioned. On the surface, it was Daisy’s cruelty and coldness and Gatsby’s foolish and blind insist that caused Gatsby’s death, however, essentially it was the big gap between the dream and reality and the metamorphism of the American Dream that bred Gatsby’s tragedy.
If Gatsby represented one part of Fitzgerald’s personality, the flashy celebrity who pursued and glorified wealth in order to impress the woman he loved, then Nick represented another part: the quiet, reflective Midwesterner adrift in the lurid East. Nick Carraways, perhaps the most sensible and upright man in the novel, who was honest, tolerant and inclined to reserve judgment, was also in the shadow of American Dream. After being educated at Yale and fighting in World War I., he decided to go East and learn the bond business for he had clearly saw that the Middle East now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe instead of being the warm center of the world. Insofar as Nick played a role inside the narrative, he evidenced a strongly mixed reaction to life on the East Coast, one that created a powerful internal conflict that he did not resolve until the end of the book. During the three months in the East, on one hand, he was attracted to the fast-paced, fun-driving lifestyle of New York; on the other hand, he found that lifestyle grotesque and damaging. Finally after witnessing the unraveling of Gatsby’s dream and presiding over the appalling spectacle of Gatsby’s funeral, he realized that the fast life of revelry on the East Coast was a cover for the terrifying moral emptiness that the valley of ashes symbolized. Having gained the maturity that this insight demonstrated, he determinedly ended the relationship with Jordan Baker and decided to come back home. Thus, his dream to seek a profitable business in the East was also ruined.
Of course, such a miserable fate could never fail to fall on the poor people from working-class such as Mr. and Mrs. Wilson who also inevitably became victims of American Dream in the story. Mr. Wilson, the lifeless, exhausted owner of a run-down auto shop at the edge of the valley of ashes, loved and idealized his wife Myrtle so much that he was devastated by her affair and was consumed with extreme grief when Myrtle was killed. He shot Gatsby and also killed himself at last. To some extent, he was comparable to Gatsby in that both were dreamers and both were ruined by their unrequited love for women. As to Mrs. Wilson, she was a woman who possessed a fierce vitality and desperately looked for a way to improve her situation. To become a rich person like the woman in the upper class, she chose to be the mistress of Tom, who actually treated her as a mere object of his desire. Thus her final tragic fate was not so unexpected. When she was killed at last, all her hope and dream vanished into smoke with the loss of her life.
In addition to these people from the lower class, Daisy and Tom, who were born in very wealthy families, were also typical representative indicative of the popularity and disillusion of American Dream from the other side. As was revealed in the novel, Tom was an arrogant, hypocritical irresponsible bully whose social attitudes were laced with racism and sexism and who never even considered trying to live up to the moral standard he demanded from those around him. Daisy, whose voice was full of money, was definitely a golden girl. Selfish, hollow, cold and detached, she was only in love with money, ease and material luxury. She was capable of affection, but not of sustained loyalty or care. She was indifferent even to her own infant daughter, never discussing her and treating her as an afterthought when she was introduced in Chapter Seven. Tom and Daisy— just as the book described, they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. Their behaviors truly reflected the social condition of that age when the corruption of values and the decline of spiritual life was quite serious. This laterally showed the disillusion of American Dream.
After in-depth analyses, we obviously can see that, everyone, no matter what was his character, no matter what was his original dream, all became the victims of the American Dream, for some lost their dreams and some even lost their lives. The only thing left was endless dismal and grief, permeating a sense of deep disillusionment.
Through the whole legendary story, the author presented to us the chaotic American society in 20th century, which, in my view, can help us gain more understanding of modern society as well, especially modern times in China. As is known, it has not been very long since our economy took off and the economy of our country is developing very fast at the moment, in the course of which, undoubtedly, some moral corruption will spring up and the thought that money can make everything will dominate some people. Therefore, such a novel with great treasure is definitely worth reading and can give us some reflection on the reality which will be of great help for our development.
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