Great Gatsby and the American Dream

I just finished F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—what a fantastic book. Right at the heart of Fitzgerald’s novel is what we American’s like to call “the American Dream.” Sure the phase is pompous and self-righteous. And sure, Americans and their so-called “American Dream” have no right to monopolized the idea of hope and self-betterment, those are concepts shared by all people, everywhere. Points duly noted. However, for millions, since our origins as an untamed virgin mass of land, America has represented a ray of hope in a world of semidarkness. Additionally, America, for quite a long time, has symbolized a unique type of hope, different perhaps than that represented by other nations: the countries of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, with great empires speckled throughout history, are nostalgic about their past—Americans are nostalgic about their future.

The truth is, however, it is only a dream, a happy story told to a hopeful many, a fairytale told to kids as they go off to bed. Just take a look around. The grim reality is millions without healthcare, millions without jobs, or education, or food on their tables. The Dream has been used to justify the slaughtering of millions of Indians and the usurping of vast areas of land. Yet, the thought, the idea, the hope, somehow, still lives on.

Great adversity has always run parallel to the great Dream. People are quick to pulverized nuance and complexity in order to grasp hold of hope, Americans are no exception: we think we are Good only because they are Bad, we dream of the ultimate Happiness only becuase we live in the ultimate Sadness. We’ll fight the Indians because they are Bad, we’ll fight nature in the Great Midwest because it is Bad, we’ll fight Hitler because he is Bad, and we’ll fight the Soviet Union and communism because it is Bad. The American Dream is defined by those who wish to destroy it; indeed, Good doesn’t exist when Bad dies out. We define ourselves by our enemies, there's no doubt.

It is precisely the necessity of adversity, the need for Bad and for struggle, that makes the Dream itself so destructive. The American Dream catalyzes our desire for a better life, for self improvement—once the Dream is realized, once we have no fight to win, we have no hope to call our own, and we have reason to live on. It is for this reason that the decadent and wealthy 1920s, the context of The Great Gatsby, was characterized by hopeless nihilism and pitiful hedonism. They had no dream with no adversity. With no future promise of greater wealth and prosperity, Daisy and Tom Buchanan had nothing more to hope for; they had nothing more to live for. In the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Good triumphed and Evil died out. However, just as Gatsby was destroyed by realizing his own Dream, America too, when those fateful planes hit our Twin Trade Centers, was destroyed by its own success.

In the end, the Dream was never just about wealth and prosperity, it’s been about living a better and brighter future, about living contently and happily; indeed, money’s been a vehicle of idealism; a means, not an ends. The American Dream is about hope, not money. The dream, inflated by myths and misconceptions, represents not an attainable goal that we can hope to achieve, but hope itself. Without this hope we’ll all surely perish.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald