Without a Dreamer: A Look into the Great Gatsby

e vulgar pursuit of wealth and materialism in the 1920s.

Gatsby’s life is much like the American Dream, in that, America in the 1920s had become a place where nothing could be attained and attempting to transcend ones social status was futile. As Nick Carraway narrates, “I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes...a fresh, green breast of the new world. It vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; or a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” (Fitzgerald 171). Gatsby was the spiritual descendent of these Dutch sailors and much like them he set out for gold and stumbled upon a dream, but ultimately lost his way and was veered off track by the reality of America. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses Gatsby to symbolize a person in whom the Dream is still very much alive as part of a vanished past where America was seen as a land of great opportunity. He represents an ideal that has grown exceedingly rare in the 1920s, where despite his imperfections, is still able to be recognized as a visionary capable of grand passion and dreams. However, as the character of Dan Cody subtly suggests, America in the 1920s is no longer a place where a self-made man can thrive, as seen in the painfully awkward luncheon party when both the Sloanes and the Buchanans treat Gatsby with contempt and condescension because he is not of the long-standing American upper class. Though Gatsby is fabulously wealthy, he is still regarded as socially inferior as part of the nouveau riche West Egg. Perhaps Nick sums Gatsby’s fate well when he states, “ So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” (Fitzgerald 189). Here, Nick reveals Gatsby’s lifelong quest to transcend his past as ultimately futile. In comparing this backward-driving force to the current of a river, Fitzgerald presents it as both inexorable and, in a sense, an inevitable aspect of humanity. The America envisioned by its founders was a land made for men like Gatsby and was intended to be a place where visionary dreamers could thrive. Instead, people like Tom and Daisy Buchanan have recreated the grotesqueries and excesses of the European aristocracy in the New World. Gatsby, for all his wealth and greatness, could not become a part of their world; his noble attempt to engineer his own d

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