Happiness In The Great Gatsby

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The fore Founding Fathers of America introduced the revolutionary idea that each person's desire to pursue their idea of happiness was not self-indulgence, but a necessary driver of a prosperous society. This was basically the biases of the American Dream. The American Dream is an illusion, filled with dishonesty and corruption. Hopeful Americans and immigrants believe that freedom will lead to prosperity and this, in turn, will bring happiness. This prospect of joy is like a mirage and all those who believe in the American Dream will feel cheated, as it's not something one can truly capture.It is like trying to hold water in the palms but only succeeding in wetting them because water trickles down. Jay Gatsby’s lavish parties, characterized…show more content…
The splendid parties he throws, as grand as they may seem to the simple wandering eye, are paid for with the money of immoral actions, Gatsby. Although Gatsby tries to conceal his business affairs, Tom studies Gatsby’s life out of suspicion and finds that Gatsby “bought up a lot of side-street drugstores and sold grain alcohol over the counter” (Fitzgerald, 143). Gatsby, the man who wrote as a boy a list of “general resolve” to make himself a better man, abandoned his childhood character in the pursuit of wealth and happiness…show more content…
People like Gatsby created an illusion for the rest of the countrymen that twisted the idea behind the American dream and broke down the moral values that hopeful young Americans once believed in. In The Great Gatsby, the twenties are depicted as a time of defiance from moral values, and Fitzgerald uses Gatsby’s parties as a medium to demonstrate this loss of moral values in post World War I America. The “roaring” twenties were a time of great social decay, and Gatsby’s parties are a symbol for the moral degradation that occurred everywhere in the twenties, from the valley of ashes to the drugstores, where you can buy anything
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