American Dream in The Great Gatsby Literary Essay Example

📌Category: Books, The Great Gatsby
📌Words: 573
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 23 March 2022

In The Great Gatsby, there are many examples of what some people consider the ¨American Dream¨. With Jay Gatsby's obsession with the past on trying to recreate what was instead of focusing on what is, with Tom Buchanan and his sense of power and control over everything and everyone in his life, with Daisy Buchanan and her yearning for material goods and wealth over real happiness, showing how the idea of the american dream is subjective to each person, with their own goals and values always affecting this American Dream. In real life however, the ¨American dream¨ was nothing more than the false ideal that hard work and determination will get you wherever you want in life regardless of wealth or social standing, pushed by the bourgeois to the proliferate to force society into a state of constant work to produce the max amount of goods possible, in turn creating the highest profit for whoever is at the top, at the expense of those at the bottom.

In the Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby vs George Wilson is the perfect example of the misappropriations of the american dream, and the way it can infect peoples views of themselves and others around them. Jay Gatsby represents the idea that ¨If you work hard, you can achieve anything you want¨, despite earning his money in various, sometimes even illegal, means. He has earned his money off the suffering and work of others mostly, selling bootlegged alcohol and other various illegal activities, yet Gatsby has emmassed this large wealth, house, and social standing because of it. This is in juxtaposition to George Wilson, who solely works in his garage, doing hard labor to earn his money, even if it is miniscule in comparison to Gatsby, showing that hard work doesn't always get you somewhere in life. “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired” (Fitzgerald 44).  This shows how during this time, many people were working themselves half to death just to get by, while Gatsby can just cheat his was to the top with his bootleg liquor

This all begs the question, what does the American dream mean for others? For the immigrants and refugees teeming Americas shores as the Statue of Liberty's plaque reads, do they get this american dream? The answer is unfortunately no. Many immigrants will never get to experience the same american dream as we do as natural citizens, always being seen as secondary citizens despite the enormous amount of work and effort they and many other minorites put into the creation of america. ¨From my ten years documenting the poverty, pain, and frustration of lower-income communities it is easy to conclude that the American Dream is dead for the working class¨ (Arnade 1). According to New American Economy, undocumented immigrants contributed $13 billion into the Social Security funds in 2016 and $3 billion to Medicare, despite not reaping any of the benefits at the risk of deportation. In the Great Gatsby, we see how Gatsby was able to use the suffering and work of others through his bootleg liquor to rise up through the ranks of the wealthy class, just as america used immigrants and minorities to skyrocket america into a world superpower, then tossing them aside when they were deemed not necessary anymore. 

The American Dream is, to put it frankly, dead. If it even existed to begin with that is. The american dream was just an excuse for the wealthy to push those lower in class then them to work harder in order to make them more profit, while the workers reap very, very little percentages of what their labor is truly worth, which certainly makes it seem more like the american nightmare.

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