Aspirations And Greatness : F. Scott Fitzgerald 's ' The Great Gatsby '

“Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so,” once said Charles de Gaulle. This valiant quote by a former president of France accentuates my opinion of the Great Jay Gatsby. From humble beginnings rises our main focus of F. Scott Fitzgeralds’ The Great Gatsby. Young Jimmy Gatz is brought to West Egg from his heavily impoverished North Dakota family. His desire to be something greater than a farmer drove him to fortune and love through any means necessary; his life long obsession, Daisy Fay, infatuates Jay in his own insatiable thirst for her affection. James follows Daisy in the years after he is deployed to World War 1, and when he sees she has married Tom Buchanan he becomes hell-bent on replicating the success Tom has inherited in order to win over Daisy. Through moderately deceitful ways, Jay Gatsby builds his wealth and reputation to rival and even supersede many already lavish family names. Astonishingly, the great Mr. Gatsby, overrun with newfound affluence, stays true to his friends, lover, and his own ideals to his blissfully ignorant end.

By depicting Gatsby and Jean’s lower class origins, Fitzgerald and Strindberg set the scene for their aspirations and inevitable failure. Jay Gatsby was originally James Gatz a young man from a poor, uneducated family. However, from a young age, he possessed a focused ambition, as shown by his time-table and list of goals for personal improvement. Even after James Gatz becomes Jay Gatsby on the water, ambition remains Gatsby’s main attribute, and he

Thesis: The pursuit of the American Dream is a dominant theme throughout The Great Gatsby, which is carried out in various ways by F. Scott Fitzgerald, how the author represents this theme through his characters and their actions is one small aspect of it.

Even though Gatsby was born James Gatz on a small farm in North Dakota, he was motivated by Dan Cody and Daisy to dedicate his life to the achievement of wealth and love. Some people might claim that Gatsby was able to achieve his dream because he succeeded in becoming a fabulously wealthy man in West Egg. However, this is only partially true, for Gatsby’s genuine American Dream was to attain Daisy Buchanan. Therefore, this novel portrays both the power and deleterious result of the American Dream (C. J. Dawson).

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby provides the reader with a unique outlook on the life of the newly rich. Gatsby is an enigma and a subject of great curiosity, furthermore, he is content with a lot in life until he strives too hard. His obsession with wealth, his lonely life and his delusion allow the reader to sympathize with him.

When Cody died, he left the boy, now Jay Gatsby, a legacy of $25,000. Unfortunately

Little did many people know that at the age of seventeen Gatsby had changed his name from “James Gatz” to his now notorious name everyone knew (Fitzgerald 104). Despite what he told many people, Jay grew up extremely poor and eventually would join the army to try and make more of himself. Gatsby eventually exited the army as a decorated veteran, but “...had to keep on wearing his uniform because he couldn’t buy some regular clothes” (Fitzgerald 182). This showed how his financial situation started out because as a young man, he could barely afford clothes let alone dream about the lavish lifestyle he would soon come upon. In pursuit of wealth and success after his service in the army, Gatsby would go on to enter a ethically questionable business in his time to gain his foothold on success and become one of the most well known men in West Egg.

Any American is taught a dream that is purged of all truth. The American Dream is shown to the world as a belief that anyone can do anything; when in reality, life is filled with impossible boundaries. In the novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald gives us a glimpse into the life of the upper class during the roaring twenties through the eyes of a moralistic young man named Nick Carraway. It is through the narrator's dealings with the upper class that the reader is shown how modern values have transformed the American Dream's pure ideals into a scheme for materialistic power, and how the world of the upper class lacks any sense of morals or consequence. In order to support Fitzgerald's message

The American dream is easily the greatest of any American tragedy. Once one of the most noble and sought after ideas, now only a simple idea cast aside by differing virtuosos in differing professions.

People watching can be a very amusing, insightful, or judgemental experience, but rarely does one reflect on how his/her actions might be viewed in the eyes of another person. By focusing on the lives of others, people lose sight of their reality and create a blurred metal image of what they want their life to be. Their actions then follow this image and become more of those written in a storybook than the realistic reactions to the present. Steinbrink describes this action as an attempt to “alter reality in order to bring it in line with [one’s] dream.” Several characters in Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby become encumbered by their dreams and unable to act on reality as it is.

Jay Gatsby is a man with a dream and will stop at nothing to attain it.  When he loses the love of his life to a wealthy, sophisticated and bigoted socialite, his mind is set.  Born a poor farm boy, he centers his life around achieving extraordinarily vast amounts of wealth and great social status.  The poor man never gets the girl; in fact, he never gets anything in Gatsby's eyes.  Gatsby is determined not only to be rich, but become the richest man who ever lived.  When he does become the richest man who ever lived, he wants to become the ultimate ruler of the universe.  Gatsby wants to be God.  Nick Carraway, his laid-back and observant neighbor, despises Gatsby's flamboyant and exaggerated ways.  However, he comes to admire Gatsby

Everyone has an ideal vision of what he or she wants out of life. In a perfect world, everyone would die happy having achieved every goal ever set. A perfect world does not exist. Fitzgerald knows this, and he chronicles the life of Gatsby. Gatsby deeply desires to live out the “American dream.” He wants fame, riches, parties, mansions, but most of all love. Gatsby succeeds in every area except the most important. Gatsby still feels a desire to fulfill his final dream of finding a true love. Not willing to settle for an arbitrary love, Gatsby sets his sights on a young woman named Daisy. The problem is that Gatsby can never have Daisy because she is already in a relationship with another man. Gatsby, still wanting Daisy’s love but

The Great Gatsby exemplifies the way of America during the Jazz Age, also known as “The Roaring Twenties.” The tale of a deeply flawed man captures the idea of any possibility of achieving the American Dream- “the set of ideals in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success.” Despite the author tip-toeing around the way Gatsby earned his wealth, there is a dark suspicion that secretly runs throughout Fitzgerald’s novel. Jay Gatsby is not the all-around guy he is cracked up to be, he is a man driven by greed and selfishness. Almost without a doubt, the characters are willing to lie, steal, cheat, and even commit murder to get what they truly want.

Jay Gatsby is not a lazy person, he cannot stop working until his dreams have been realized, he knows that he is destined for greatness, and to not seek out greatness would be a waste, as Nick says,“So he made the most of his time, he took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously”(Fitzgerald 149). Gatsby’s drive is everything to him since before he met Daisy, he has strived to become more than just some kid from nowhere. As a self-made millionaire, he can only afford to rely on himself and himself alone, as there may be no one else in this world who may believe in him. Opportunities to succeed present themselves to people every day, but only a few have the gifts needed to utilize these opportunities, one of whom, is Jay Gatsby, as Nick says, “he was only a young man, but he had a lot brain power here”(Fitzgerald 168). In life, humans are blessed with many things, arms, legs, a heart, one’s very soul, is a blessing. Although the one thing that holds weight over all else, the one thing that can never be taken away, is one’s mind. Knowledge is power, especially as one climbs higher into the social rankings of society. James Gatz did not just become Jay Gatsby overnight, he was built up over the course of many years of experiences, as Nick says,“My first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence,

F. Scott Fitzgerald was extremely important to American literature mostly due to his accurate portrayal of the 1920s in “The Great Gatsby.” Up until this point, the roaring twenties was a somewhat mysterious world but with “The Great Gatsby”, many people got at least a peek into the unknown. Coincidentally, it wasn’t just that one large seller of his that impacted society, but also many of his others writings since they to tell the truth of the world. With so many of his writings influencing the world around him, it is extremely hard to say that he was not influential. Fitzgerald brought upon the idea of telling the truth of the world in writing, especially through complex narratives. Fitzgerald missed out on the drama of World War I and instead