gatdream Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby - Casting Doubt Upon the American Dream :: Great Gatsby Essays

Casting Doubt Upon the the Statesn Dream in The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby is set in the write out Age of America, the 1920s which have come to be seen as a bubble of extravagance and affluence which burst with the Wall Street scare in 1929. Fitzgerald wrote the mass in 1925, and in it he explores the funda handstal fickleness which characterized the Age as he saw it, and casts doubt upon the very issue of American national identity - the American Dream. The American Dream is a concept elegantly simple and yet peculiarly hard to de okay. At the root of it is the sense that America was created entirely separate from the Old solid ground the settlers had escaped from the feudal, fractious and somewhat ossified nations of Europe and been presented with a destiny to start a sensitive - a fresh green breast of the new introduction. From this blank slate, those first idealistic settlers had created a society where all men are created equal and every superstar had the chance to do the best for themselves as they could. permit us examine the passage from the Declaration of Independence from which that quote is interpreted We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are empower with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A fine and daring ideal in the 18th century, and at the heart of what America hoped that it stood for. The Great Gatsby examines how this dream existed in the early 20th century and whether or not it had been accomplished. The American Dream permeated all of society, and so every one of the characters in the book is in some senses a reflection of the the world envisaged by Jefferson and Washington, and even before them by those first people fleeing to a new life in the New World. When we examine the characters in the book we can immediately see that they are not all innate(p) equal. Daisy and Tom, and to some extent Nick, are born into a rich, old money environment which is symbolised in the novel by the established wealth of East Egg - a place of glittering white palaces. Gatsby and the Wilsons are not old money, and despite Gatsbys wealth we get the impression throughout the book that through all his parties and societal events he is trying to join that old clique, but never succeed in elevating himself to the distinguished secret society of Tom and Daisy.