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Andreas Hale

Mr.Smith

E Block

12/20/22

Jay Gatsby and the Disillusionment of the American Dream; A literary analysis of how the

American Dream is displayed throughout “The Great Gatsby”

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald has a common theme of disillusionment within the

normalized ideals of the American dream. Characters like Gatsby are exactly what the American

dream at the time described success and happiness as; wealthy, intelligent and hardworking. To

make money for the sake of making money when in reality he does not feel complete and

remains somber and lonely up until his own death. Fitzgerald describes disillusionment involving

the 1920’s variation of the American Dream in the Great Gatsby through the characteristics and

desires of Jay Gatsby throughout the book.

During the 1920’s, the American dream had essentially transformed from a ideal vision of

equality and trust within the country into the idea that any citizen could get a job, obtain a family

and partake in obtaining wealth for not much reason or purpose other than obtaining wealth., Aas

described in Rim Belaid’s Immigration to the United States From the American Dream to the

Disillusionment, “another factor was the change of the idea itself, as it is well depicted in Scott

Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”. When the American Dream became about acquiring as much

wealth as you can regardless of the way or the reason to achieve it. ” (Belaid) So as an idea, the

American dream has changed over the years from a goal that involves obtaining wealth to

achieve your dreams into a quest to achieve wealth for not much purpose or reason. This is

reflected in Gatsby as Fitzgerald presents the namesake as a man who has acquired a great

amount of wealth and has many possessions, but even with all of this in his name he isn’t living
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his ideal dream. He still desires the love of Daisy Buchanan. Daisy, however, is with another

man, Tom Buchanan, and while Gatsby was following everything the American Dream

encourages citizens to acquire; a college education, even if only for a few months, a high net

worth, a beautiful car, and a fancy house, he missed out on the love he could have shared with

Daisy. So Gatsby patches all of this sorrow with radiant parties and opportunities to get Daisy’s

attention and seemingly never prevails. As written in Fahimeh Keshmiri’s analytical article The

Disillusionment of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dreams and Ideals in The Great Gatsby “Totally, The

Great Gatsby is an extremely symbolic deliberation in 1920s America, particularly the

dissolution of the American dream in an era of wealth. Gatsby is the personification of this

dream. A disadvantaged farm boy is a prosperous man now. He has gained extraordinary

wealth in a few years, but he is never really one of the privileged and his dream is just a

frontage.” (Keshmiri) This evidence highlights the point that even with all of Gatsby's triumphs

and successes, his path has not led him to happiness or privilege. With all of his achievements,

he still has gained little significance from a societal point of view. Both Belaid and Keshmiri’s

texts come to the conclusion that even with the massive amount of wealth that Gatsby has

acquired, he fails to achieve true happiness or privilege and the way this reflects on the

American dream is that from Gatsby’s perspective, it was about achieving enough money to

earn Daisy’s love but in reality all of this wealth added up to nothing. Belaid claims that Gatsby

claims wealth for the sake of obtaining wealth and Keshmiri claims all of the wealth he acquired

means nothing to society, and both of these intertwine into that idea that Gatsby’s wealth did

next to nothing to support his dream of having love and happiness.

When it comes to the text itself, there’s multiple points in the story where Gatsby realizes his

path of wealth hasn’t led him to happiness. On page 124 of The Great Gatsby, from Nick's

perspective, Fitzgerald writes that “No telephone message arrived… I have an idea that Gatsby

himself didn‘t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must

have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single
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dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky…A new world, material without being real,

where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…” (Fitzgerald 124) In this

specific scene, Gatsby is realizing the consequences of living in a dream solely comprised of

wealth and success. and, in the process, also coming to the realization that he has spent so

long living with this dream of money that he got stuck on the idea that all he needed was his

wealth and Daisy, leaving him vulnerable to losing sight of what really mattered to him and

being unable to live his life. Another supporting piece of this idea occurs at the end of the novel

after the funeral of Jay Gatsby when Nick looks at Gatsby’s house and wonders what his

dreams were like,. Fitzgerald describes the thoughts of Nick as “And as I sat there brooding on

the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at

the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have

seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind

him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic

rolled on under the night.” (Fitzgerald 138) Here, in this scene, there is a realization that Gatsby

had never realized that he had already passed his dream and was trying to live in the past for so

long that he never got to embrace the future. What both of these quotes summarize is the idea

that Gatsby had wasted a lot of his time following the ideals of the American dream and never

acquired the things that he really wanted due to the fact that he never truly realized he was

already past them. These relate with Belaid and Rim’s articles in the sense that for someone

like Gatsby, who came to a new perspective and realized his own faults when it was already too

late for him to change, wealth does not lead to happiness. It has an impact on success but it will

never lead anyone directly to tranquility and privilege.

In conclusion, Fitzgerald gives a view of disillusionment in the American Dream through

Gatsby’s character. He starts off as a staple image of the American Dream, wealthy, healthy

and successful. But as the story continues, the reader as well as Gatsby realizes he is not

happy nor will he ever be if he continues down the path of the wealthy era.
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Works Cited

Belaid, Rim. Immigration to the United States from the American Dream to the ...

http://archives.univ-biskra.dz/bitstream/123456789/6370/1/BELAID%20Rim.pdf.

Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Key. The Great Gatsby. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.

Keshmiri, Fahimeh. The Disillusionment of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dreams and Ideals in

the ... https://www.academypublication.com/issues2/tpls/vol06/06/21.pdf.

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Skill Not Foundational Proficient Advanced

Yet

Identifies a topic Appears in first Thesis establishes a

paragraph complex claim

Thesis establishes a
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topic and a claim

Comments:

Thesis

Includes two or Includes evidence Includes specific,

fewer sources from scholarly and meaningful, and

informational well-chosen

Some evidence sources that connect evidence that relates

relates to the thesis to the novel and to the thesis

support the thesis

Evidence

Comments:

Summarizes sources Explains how Explains well-

evidence supports selected points of

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topic sentence of comparison among

individual sources and

paragraphs evidence and their

connection to the

Explains how details thesis

Analysis
in the novel are

significant in

regards to context,

character, plot, or

theme

Comments:

Little connection Explains how the Clearly explains

between texts; texts/sources are relationships among

difficult for the related, though texts (how they

reader to see how points could be confirm or challenge

the texts are related more selective or each other, build on

better developed each other, provide

Synthesis differing
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Includes multiple perspectives, etc.)

sources in each body

paragraph

Comments:

Some elements Heading is correctly No errors in MLA

missing or some formatted format

errors in MLA format

Pages are numbered

In-text citations are

correctly formatted

Works Cited format:

hanging indent,
MLA Format
double-spaced,

alphabetized, starts

on a new page

Works Cited: each

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source entry is in

correct MLA format

Comments:

Shows evidence of Most quotes are All quotes are

basic proofreading correctly integrated correctly integrated

Follows essay Shows evidence of

Conventions
organization careful proofreading

Shows evidence of

proofreading

Comments:

Andreas,
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Overall really solid outlook on the topic. I want to work with you to now look more closely at your

sentence structures and language use. These practices will turn this from a good essay into a

great essay.

Grade: A-