The American Dream In The Great Gatsby

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F Scott. Fitzgerald’s well-known novel the Great Gatsby’s foundations are based upon the American Dream and it is a bleak representation (Pearson, 638). It was not about U.S itself as the term “America” did not have the same meaning like it did in 1920s (Bermand, 38). The novel is about how did the American Dream fail, and as the Jazz Age as an age of excess (Zeitz, gilderlehrman), it was the perfect setting for such a theme. In the Jazz Age, which is also known as the Roaring Twenties or Golden Twenties, everybody seemed to have money and no one could have foreseen the events of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 until it actually was a reality. It was an age filled with glamourous living style. After the Great War, Americas previous social…show more content…
In the novel we can see people refusing to accept reality, mirroring into what is actually happening to people in the Jazz Age. With people not facing the truth, the truth in the end hit them hard with the Wall Street Crash, knocking people back into reality. Other than the issue of wealth, what else does the Great Gatsby tell us about the Jazz Age, that it has become the definitive text for the Jazz Age? At first glance, nothing seems more remote from The Great Gatsby than the is- sue of racial segregation or black empowerment. Despite the novel's being set in metropolitan New York, African Americans almost never appear in Gatsby's world. Yet, from Garveyism to the fledgling Harlem Renaissance, New York was becoming the mecca of black American politics and culture. The near complete absence of blacks from the novel can be comprehended only if we factor in the ubiquitous power of racial segregation. The absence of African Americans alongside the novel's conspicuous appropriation of black culture is what makes it a definitive text of the so-called Jazz Age (Decker, 56). As a prophet of the American dream, Gatsby fails-miserably-a victim of his own warped idealism and false set of values. The American dream is not to be a reality, in that it no longer exists, except in the minds of men like Gatsby, whom it destroys in their espousal and relentless pursuit of it. The American dream is, in reality, a nightmare (Pearson,
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