American Dream In The Great Gatsby

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The character Daisy Buchanan, who is overly wealthy, is used to criticize equally corrupted dream of the upper class. Fitzgerald portrays her to illustrate how people are still struggling to find true happiness in life even with wealth, marriage and high social class. First, Daisy is the character who partially fulfills the requirements for the American Dream because she was born into wealthy social class, which members of lower classes have striven for. However, she finds her life still dissatisfying and unhappy even by having wealth. Like her name “Daisy” suggests, she appears as an innocent victim of her husband, Tom Buchanan, and is desperate to acquire full love and attention from him; yet, on the inside, she is full of greed for more …show more content…
The image of Gatsby is one where he is reaching out but he never experiences happiness nor fulfills or reach his American dream. First, Gatsby explains why Americans remained unhappy after achieving their American dream by working hard: their aim was to buy happiness with money. Gatsby starts out as a lower class in North Dakota, but gets rich by illegally bootlegging liquor, giving him enough wealth to be part of the East and West Egg community. He shows the Lost Generation’s misinterpretation of the American dream as earning money, and believing it can bring them happiness. Second, Gatsby is used to present the lack of fulfillment and falseness of Americans during the lost generation. He throws parties, but does not really get involved himself. He uses the party, which he never attends, to entertain himself. In Sarah Skwire’s literary critic on The Great Gatsby, she notes “Gatsby’s enormous house… [lighting] up and empty, and then empty of even the light”. He “didn’t cut the pages” of the books in his library because they are only used as a tool to appear scholarly and get admittance to the elite community. Through Gatsby, Fitzgerald to reveals the “deathly hollowness” that is embedded in the Lost Generation (Pidgeon 180). Lastly, the way he is separated by water from Daisy metaphorically emphasizes that
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