American Dream

"Gatsby himself didn't believe [her call] would come, an perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is - (Fitzgerald 169). Nick compared Gatsby's illusions of Daisy to the idea of a rose. Nick said that Gatsby must have realized what a "grotesque- thing a rose is. In saying this Nick means is that the conventional social idea in the world about a rose connoting atheistic beauty is because people give it that symbolism. Nick believes that roses are not inherently beautiful; that it is only so because people have come to perceive it that way. Nick further implies that Daisy will be nothing more than a rich, idle, boring, hollow and negligent housewife who has no moral strength or regards for anyone, not even her own baby. The novel ends with Gatsby's murder by the enraged husband of the woman who Daisy ran over in Gatsby's car one night. After Gatsby's death Nick believes that Gatsby gave all he had for a dream that had little promise, noting that "Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out Daisy's dock his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him."" (Fitzgerald 189).
             Then, John Steinbeck illustrates the impossibility of the American dream in his novel Of Mice and Men, through the lives of his central characters. Set during the Great Depression era the characters have dreams typically American of this era: dreams for untarnished happiness and for the freedom or opportunity to follow their own desires. The two central characters, George and Lennie are homeless and continuously migrating workers. They relentlessly work, never reaping the benefits of their work. They dream of living "off the fatta the lan'- (Steinbeck 14) and the opportunities owning land would bring.