The Broken of the American Dream

李瑾 李妍

【Abstract】F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the greatest American writers of the 1920s. his masterpiece The Great Gatsby just holds up a mirror to the social conviction and meditation on American history. In this novel, we could see Gatsbys disillusionment and the end of the American dream.

【Key words】 American Dream; Materialism

F.Scott Fitsgerald is one of the greatest American writers of the 1920s. By 1960, 20 years after his death, he had achieved a secure place among Americas enduring writers and was firmly lodged with Hemmingway and Faulkner as one of the three “Great” writers of the 1920s. His masterpiece “The Great Gatsby” was published in 1925, which just hold up a mirror to the social reality of the fascinating Jazz age. This work shows to a certain extent the influence caused Great Depression to the American society.

We could say The Great Gatsby reflects Fitzgeralds life experience and the social background. The characteristic of Fitzgeralds writing is the result of his family background and his love and marriage life with Zelda. The age he lived in was a turbulent one, in which manners and morals changed and materialism prevailed. In his novel, he recorded the typical experiences of the youth in the 1920s——the pursuit , disillusionment and agony, and revealed their spiritual reality. Fitzgerald lived a hard life from his childhood, so in his characters, he shows two sides: inferiority and fantasy. In the First World War, he joined the army, and fell in love with Zelda, daughter of a famous lawyer. Zelda was beautiful but vain. She had no intention to marry Fitzgerald because of his poor economic state. In 1920, he published his first novel “This Side of Paradise” which brought him the fame and wealth as well as his idealized “golden” girl.

Fitzgerald depicted the character Gatsby according to his own experience. His wife Zelda is the original image of Daisy. In this novel, Gatsby, Daisy and Tom, the three main characters, form a triangle relationship. It shows Fitzgeralds fear that Zelda might have sold herself to someone else who would be richer than himself. It is also an indication of how powerfully his thoughts and imagination had been affected by the brutal reality of money. In this novel, Fitzgerald presents a vivid picture of peoples moral state, which reflects the reality of the Jazz Age. In this gray area, everything became ash and took the form of ash. This is the image of the new world, the modern society, and the epitome of the moral state of the Jazz Age.

Hedonism is a common scene in the society where the materialism prevailed. The love between Gatsby and Daisy is found on the foundation of material seducement at the beginning. Daisy is a social butterfly. One of the reasons why she loved Gatsby is that Gatsby lied to her about his own background in order to convince her that he was good enough for her. We could say, in his mind, the image of woman connects closely with money. Later, to his great sadness, Daisy married a wealthy man, Tom. He believed that its money that makes Daisy change her mind and stain her pure heart. He made his heart to become rich and finally get successful. He built a palace in order to win back his love. Actually, Gatsby is a tragic figure. He dedicated himself to winning Daisy back, making her the single goal of all of his dreams and the main motivation behind his acquisition of immense wealth through criminal activity. To Gatsby, Daisy represents the paragon of perfection— she has the aura of charm, wealth, sophistication, grace, and aristocracy that he longed for as a child in North Dakota and that first attracted him to her. His greatest dream is to win back his true love. However, he doesnt know this kind of love is idealized and purified. He wants to use material as a bait to call back his “idealized lover”, so his love is based on material and has been stained.

However, in reality, Daisy falls far short of Gatsbys ideals. She is beautiful and charming, but also fickle, shallow, bored, and sardonic. Nick characterizes her as a careless person who smashes things up and then retreats behind her money. Daisy could be regarded as he spokeswoman of the sense emptiness. Being a wife of a rich man, she lived luxuriously, but aimlessly. Her mind is empty. Just like Fitzgeralds wife Zelda, Daisy is in love with money, ease, and material luxury. She is capable of affection, but not of sustained loyalty or care.

Daisy as Gatsbys dream is a great satire. This novel is a commentary on the failure of the American spirit, which is an important element of American culture. The American Dream is an attitude of hope and faith that looks forward to the fulfillment of human wishes and desires. So Gatsbys experience is not just an illustration of personal struggle but a representative of the American dream and American spirit. Gatsbys dream is a mixture of idealism and materialism. At the very beginning, America as the new land, is a free land of opportunity and freedom, holding a promise of spiritual and material happiness. So the “American Dream” is a desire for both spiritual and material improvement and represented the romantic enlargement of the possibilities of life. Gatsby tries to pursue his dream everywhere in any way. In his mind, Daisy was “high in a white palace the kings daughter, the golden girl”. She stands for his dream. She is so pure and noble that she was just the symbol of love and youth he longed for. Daisy has become a promise of life for him. So his love to Daisy and his longing for Daisy just reflect his belief in the promise of life and his faith in the pursuit of the dream. In order to win Daisy back, he tries to be rich. He makes a false background for himself he holds a party to show off his rich, but didnt take part in the party. He keeps isolated and lonely. He has many shirts with different colors, but he didnt wear them. He has real books in the library, but didnt read them at all. All these material things are only used to be the means to regain his love and realize his dream. Although he was faithful to his dream and made effort to realize it, it was after all an incorruptible dream in a corrupt society. He was just the product and manifestation of the seductive and corrupting motivation involved in “the American Dream”. In that Jazz Age, fame and fortune were generally wanted. To realize his dream, Gatsby needed a fortune to fit Daisy. He had built a fortune on fraud and violence. In turn, he was doomed by the fame and fortune he got, and became the scapegoat and victim of the corrupt society. At the end of the story, Gatsby died and his dream failed and it indicated the end of the American Dream. Gatsby is identified with the past, which he tries to desperately to revive; he is united with the past, which persists in its belief in the inexhaustible fullness of its native possibilities. So Gatsbys death just predicts the end of the American Dream.