The Great Gatsby and The American Dream
Liamarie Snyder
Senior Seminar English 420
The Great Gatsby &
ABSTRACT
Advertising and conspicuous
consumption have shifted the
idea of the American Dream
from being about morals and
virtue to material
accumulation. There are
characters in F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s novel The Great
Gatsby that are believed to
have achieved the American
Dream based on their wealth.
The Great Gatsby contributes
to the changing of the
American Dream by critiquing
characters such as Tom and
Daisy Buchanan, Nick
Carraway, and Jay Gatsby.
Materialistic Accumulation
“His family were extremely wealthy – even in college his
freedom with money was a matter for reproach - but now
he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather
took your breath away; for instance, he’d brought down a
string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to
realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy
enough to do that” (Fitzgerald 6).
This quote shows that because of the money that Tom
Buchanan had, he was able to afford things that other
people couldn’t.
“On week-end his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus,
bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the
morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon
scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all the trains”
(Fitzgerald 39).
The Shift in the American Dream
Advertisements from the 1920s
“By the early 1920s, the meaning of success in America
was in transition from the traditional notion that linked
work with virtue to a more ‘secular understanding of the
‘American Dream’ that was ‘entirely economic and free of
moral obligation” (Brauer 23).
“Through Gatsby, Fitzgerald attempts to correct
Americans’ misconceptions about the American dream”
(Hearne 189).
“The dream itself is ambiguous, contradictory, romantic in
nature, and undeniably beautiful while at the same time
grotesquely flawed” (Hearne 189).
“Fitzgerald sees the American dream – its ideology and its
very character – as a contradiction to and a distortion of
reality” (Hearne 190).
All of these quotes are important because all emphasize
what the idea of the “American Dream” was during the
1920s, and in The Great Gatsby.
This quote shows the emphasis on Gatsby being able to
afford two cars because of his money.
“I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all
– Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all
Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency
in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern
Life” (Fitzgerald 176).
This quote is important because it is the narrator’s
epiphany where he understands that he and the rest of
the characters in the novel were unable to achieve the
“Eastern Life” because they all had flaws in their ideas of
what “Eastern Life” was like.
Car Advertisement from 1920
The Ads above are important to the idea of conspicuous
consumption because they are geared toward people who have
money. All three ads are saying ‘hey if you have money you can be
like me’.
Works Cited
Brauer, Stephen. “Jay Gatsby and the Prohibition Gangster as
Businessman.” F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 2 (2003):
51-71. Print.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York; Scribner,
2004. Print.
Hearne, Kimberly. “Fitzgerald’s Rendering of a Dream” The
Explicator 68.3 (2010) : 189-194. Print.