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Gatsby American Dream Quotes

Decent Essays

The American Dream in The Great Gatsby
Some consider the American dream to be a dream but The Great Gatsby portrays it as a nightmare. Throughout the book there is a lot of cheating like how Tom and Myrtle have an affair when Tom is married to Daisy Buchanan. Also, Gatsby and Daisy start an affair after her affair with Tom. Also, at the end of the book there are examples of violence and murder. Myrtle’s husband, George, shoots Gatsby at the end because he thinks that Gatsby killed his wife. In reality, Daisy was the one driving the car that struck Myrtle’s car and killed her. This book is all about living out the american dream and a lot of illegal behavior. People come to the conclusion that the American dream is good, but the book does not …show more content…

The American dream is supposed to good where people come immigrate to the United States of America and make good money and live with freedom. This is not how the book shows it. "I married him because I thought he was a gentleman . . . I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe," (Fitzgerald 34). This quote shows that cheating plays a big role in this book and that the American dream is not a dream. Cheating is against other people’s morals and against their wives or husbands morals. " Her voice is full of money," (Fitzgerald 107). This quote means a lot because it could explain why in the book people are marrying people who have money and not really loving them. Because of this, they cheat because they do not love the people they marry. The West Egg district where Nick lives is very wealthy. This is one of the reasons why the American dream in The Great Gatsby is not a …show more content…

Gatsby's lavish existence in the nouveau riche Long Island community of West Egg, moreover, cannot ever compensate for his lack of the more pedigreed wealth of East Egg. He remains an "innocent" in his single-minded pursuit of Daisy despite his association with underworld characters and ill-begotten money. The Valley of Ashes and the sign with the blank eyes of Dr. Eckleburg indicate a moral wasteland and an absent God--as well as the emptiness of the new commercial culture. Gatsby's pursuit of his dream takes on a mythic quality, mirroring the dream which led Americans to conquer the frontier. Gatsby's "frontier," however, is an ill-advised pursuit of a vacuous young woman not worthy of his love,” (Pavlovski

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