The Scrambled Dream By F. Scott Fitzgerald

In book, “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts how the American was corrupted through wealth. Fitzgerald provides many examples. The most common example shown was Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s idea that to achieve his American Dream must be to acquire wealth. In order to show this, Fitzgerald uses various literary elements. Two of those being imagery and foreshadowing, these played a critical role in describing the theme, and specific moods to show what was to come and as well as describe the story as a whole. These play a vital role in representing Gatsby’s life and journey to acquiring Daisy, his version of the American Dream.

       In F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, the principle character, Jay Gatsby makes an exhaustive effort in his quest for the American Dream. The novel is Fitzgerald's vessel of commentary and criticism of the American Dream. “Fitzgerald defines this Dream, he depicts its’ beauty and irresistible lure”(Bewley 113). Through Gatsby's downfall, Fitzgerald expresses the futility and agony of the pursuit of the dream.

The first dream that does not get fulfilled is the one of Gatsby. He starts off as an underprivileged boy and struggles his way to the top. We make his acquaintance when he is on the top of his life. He is enjoying his big house and his vast wealth. The one thing he cannot have is his lovely Daisy. Gatsby’s story reflects the “classical” American dream: Anyone can make anything of himself/herself with just elbow grease, spirit and a whole lot of confidence. Jay loves Daisy and, sadly, she is the one thing which he cannot procure to his “perfect life”.

F. Scott Fitzgerald uses white to portray innocence and class. This color is used several times while talking about Daisy. “She dressed in white and had a little white roadster” (Fitzgerald 4.74). This quote is used to convey Daisy during the innocence of her youth. The color white is pure and conveys her innocence.

Daisy is often written to go along with the color white, which most first associate it with purity and innocence, as white is often used to represent. By the end of the story, the reader sees Daisy for who she truly is, as she skips Gatsby’s funeral the reader can see the white to represent a voidness, emptiness, and lack of consciousness. The reader now

There are people who believe themselves to be pure and honest, while on the inside they truly obtain none of those qualities. The color white has always been associated with goodness and innocence; it’s usually the color one would think of when imagining an angel or the heavens. However, Fitzgerald uses this connotation with white in an ironic sense by using it to describe some of the most corrupt and none innocent people in the story. As Daniel J. Schneider states in his article on color symbolism in The Great Gatsby “White traditionally symbolizes purity, and there is no doubt that Fitzgerald wants to underscore the ironic disparity between the ostensible purity of Daisy and Jordan and their actual corruption.” Throughout the entire story, Fitzgerald is

Daisy’s car, clothes, and rooms were white. Though most of the adjectives used to describe Daisy included “white” (for example, “white girlhood”, “white neck”, and “high in a white palace”), she was not always pure, especially towards the end of the novel. This could be symbolic of the fact that even the most virtuous characters in The Great Gatsby were depraved. Examples of white included “They were both in white” (pg. 13), “Our white childhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white.” (pg. 24), and "On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it" (p.

The Great Gatsby, a novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a story of misguided love between a man and a woman. Fitzgerald takes his reader through the turbulence and trials of Jay Gatsby’s life and of his pining for the girl he met five years prior. The main theme of the novel, however, is not solely about the love shared between Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby. The main purpose is to show the decline and decay of the American Dream in the 1920’s. The American Dream is the goal or idea which suggests that all people can succeed through hard work, and that all have the potential to live happy, successful lives. While on the surface, Gatsby

The product of hard work is the wistful Jay Gatsby, who epitomizes the purest characteristics of the American Dream: everlasting hope. His burning desire to win Daisy?s love symbolizes the basis of the old dream: an ethereal goal and a never-ending search for the opportunity to reach that goal. Gatsby is first seen late at night, ?standing with his hands in his pockets? and supposedly ?out to determine what share is his of our local heavens? (Fitzgerald, pg25). Nick watches Gatsby?s movements and comments:

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).

The notion of the ‘American Dream’ is one of the repeated aspects portrayed in this book, since Gatsby’s entire life is dedicated to achieving this. The ‘American Dream’ comprises of grand opulence, social equality, wealth; more specifically, a big house with a big garden, the newest model cars, the most fashionable attire, and a traditional four-peopled ‘happy’ family. To Fitzgerald, the ‘American Dream’ itself is a positive, admirable pursuit. We can see this when Fitzgerald uses personification, “flowers”, to background positive connotations behind the idea of the ‘American Dream’. In regard to Gatsby, he achieves the wealth aspect of this ‘dream’, “he had come a long way to this blue lawn”; however, he was yet to be satisfied because he did not have Daisy. Ever since the very beginning of the story, Gatsby always associated Daisy with magnificent affluence, the white house, and the grand quality of being rich. Gatsby wanted everything ever since he was first introduced to the higher status. But Gatsby felt incomplete and unfulfilled even after getting everything he dreamt of, so he sourced this emptiness as not having Daisy, where in reality, “he neither understood or desired” the motives he thought he once had.

White is colour at its most complete and pure, the colour of perfection. The colour meaning of white is purity, innocence, wholeness and completion. The colour white was introduced into the novel when Daisy was described as wearing a white dress. The dress showed her as having a pure and innocent personality. It was actually ironic that she wore white because the reader knows of her true characteristics, even though she was represented as lovable character in the book and as well as the movie. The white covered the fact that she was having an affair with Gatsby. White can also sometimes symbolize honesty, which is something Nick looked for in people. The narrator and Gatsby were both honest men and became friends because of it. Nick stopped dating Jordan Baker

F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the finest American authors of the twentieth century wrote The Great Gatsby during the Jazz Age to critique the distortion of the American dream, and his work has lasted long past his lifetime. Fitzgerald discusses the nature of love and wealth and stresses the importance of defining a person beyond their external position. In his novel, letter to his daughter, and the screenplay adapted from the novel, it is clear that F. Scott Fitzgerald utilizes exposition, narration, and imagery to illustrate how people in the 1920s did not understand the meaning of true love and worried about superficial characteristics, thus resulting in the corruption of the American dream from the pursuit of true love and equality to the pursuit of wealth and discrimination; however, he moralizes that human beings are capable of emotional growth and of escaping the illusion of wealth.

The infamous text The Great Gatsby, by Scott F. Fitzgerald uses literary devices to criticise the American Dream whilst simultaneously endorsing the act of dreaming. It follows a young bootlegger named Gatsby in the twenties through his quest to win the attention of his ex love Daisy, who is now married to an arrogant man of old money Tom Buchanan. This message is expressed through Fitzgerald's use and manipulation of literally allusions, historical and personal context, and metaphorical motifs.

out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was