Theme Of Ambition In The Great Gatsby

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, the ideals of wealth and dreams are exhibited through the lives and experiences of Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. Specifically, Gatsby tends to waste his wealth rather than investing for the future. He uses the “green light” to serve as a constant reminder of his dreams and life goals he wishes to pursue. Nick Carraway’s friendship with Gatsby enables him to partake in the wealth and luxuries of Gatsby's lifestyle. The American Dream is brought to fruition through Gatsby’s lavish lifestyle and extravagant parties. Furthermore, the motifs of wealth and dreams are perpetually shaping and influencing the characters’ decisions, experiences and outcomes over the course of the story.

“It is the elusive Gatsby, the cynical idealist, who embodies America in all of its messy glory.” Clearly as Adam Cohen asserts in his New York Times article “Jay Gatsby, Dreamer, Criminal, Jazz Age Rogue, Is a Man for Our Times”, this phenomenon is indeed true in that the American Dream is presented in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as an idea that has been depraved into a dream characterized by the constant shift in ethics and fraudulence centered around materialistic visions of opulence and wealth.

       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.

In the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald builds theme of personal ambition by using the setting and the characterization to show the significance of the main persona, Gatsby’s personal ambition. Fitzgerald uses the setting of East Egg and West Egg and characterization of Daisy and Dan Cody on the connection they have with Jay Gatsby. Jay Gatsby’s ambition is to achieve the American Dream. In Gatsby’s eyes, to achieve the American Dream consist of becoming the richest man and sharing his wealth with the woman he loves right by his side. Jay, based of his characterization, never sees himself as the poor man and

Since American literature’s emergence, the American dream has become a conceptual ideal for many people throughout history. Although the dream has its own distinct aspects throughout different time periods, it predominantly focuses on the foundations of wealth, success and a desire for something greater. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction novel, The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby, the protagonist, is primarily known for the numerous lavish parties he throws each weekend at his ostentatious mansion in West Egg in an attempt to reunite with Daisy Buchanan, a woman he falls in love with prior to entering the war before the Roaring Twenties. However, he is seized with an impotent realization on the fact that his wealth cannot afford him the same privileges as others that are born into the upper echelon. Gatsby is completely blinded from his opulent possessions until he becomes oblivious of the fact that money cannot buy love or happiness. Throughout the story, the predilection for materialistic features causes many characters to lose sight of their aspirations, demonstrating how a dream can become easily corrupt by one’s focus on acquiring wealth and power.

Although "The Great Gatsby" is filled with multiple themes such as love, money, order, reality, illusion and immorality, no one would probably deny that the predominate one focuses on the American Dream and the downfall of those who attempt to reach its illusionary goals. The attempt to capture the American Dream is the central of this novel. This can be explained by how Gatsby came to get his fortune. By studying the process of how Gatsby tried to achieve his own so-called American Dream, we could have a better understanding of what American dream is all about, in those down-to-earth Americans' point of view. The characterization of Gatsby is a representative figure among Americans as he devoted his whole life to achieve his dream.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby focuses on the corruption of the American dream during the 1920‘s. For the duration of this time period, the American dream was no longer about hard work and reaching a set goal, it had become materialistic and immoral. Many people that had honest and incorruptible dreams, such as Jay Gatsby, used corrupted pathways to realize their fantasy. People’s carelessness was shown through their actions and speech towards others. Fitzgerald uses characterization and symbolism from different characters and items to convey the corruption of the American dream.

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 Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by Fitzgerald set in the roaring 20s, following the eponymous hero, Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s life is characterised by his ambition to retrieve the past and to be reunited with the woman he loves, Daisy Fay. Miss Julie is a play by August Strindberg, written in 1888. It focuses on an affair between a valet, Jean, and his master’s daughter, Miss Julie. In these two texts, Fitzgerald and Strindberg explore the dreams of two men from modest backgrounds, and in so doing illustrate the dangers of not being true to one’s roots and the repercussions of following unrealistic dreams.

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:

The Great Gatsby is a well written novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald where a midwesterner named Nick Carraway gets lured into the lavish and elegant lifestyle of his enigmatic neighbor, Jay Gatsby. As the story unravels, Nick Carraway begins to see through Gatsby's suave facade, only to find a desperate, heartbroken and lonely man who just wanted to relive the past with his one and only desire. This sensational love story takes place during the well known“Roaring Twenties” in New York City. The genre of this thrilling and exciting novel is historical fiction.

Oftentimes society gets so caught up in achieving greatness that it is blinded to the obstacles of reality. The American Dream can sometimes be so unachievable yet so alluring that people cannot help but strive after it as if it were their destiny. Fitzgerald highlights this phenomenon in his novel The Great Gatsby through many characters and their pursuit of their own American Dreams. Fitzgerald uses figurative language and contrasting diction to show his cynical attitude about the pursuit of the American Dream and the blindness of those who believe in it.

The Great Gatsby is a novel that illustrates the society in the 1920's and the associated beliefs, values and dreams of the American population at that time. These beliefs, values and dreams can be summed up be what is termed the "American Dream", a dream of money, wealth, prosperity and the happiness that supposedly came with the booming economy and get-rich-quick schemes that formed the essential underworld of American upper-class society. This underworld infiltrated the upper echelons and created such a moral decay within general society that paved the way for the ruining of dreams and dashing of hopes as they were placed confidently in the chance for opportunities that could be seized by one and all. Scott Fitzgerald illustrates the

The disillusionment of the American Dream is a frequent but important written theme in the American literature. Fitzgerald’s famous book The Great Gatsby is one of the most important representative works that reflects this theme. F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known for his novels and short stories which chronicle the excesses of America's Jazz Age during the 1920s. His classic twentieth-century story of Jay Gatsby examines and critiques Gatsby's particular vision of the 1920's American Dream. The Great Gatsby can be seen as a far-reaching book that has revealed many serious and hidden social problems at that time. As one of the most popular and financially successful

Sometimes the very thing someone may be reaching for is not what it seems. The American Dream is something that can be known as what it is for most people; a dream. In Scott F. Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, the main character, Jay Gatsby, throws huge parties in West Egg, New York, that many people from all over come to, in order to find his goal and to achieve his dream. Fitzgerald portrays Gatsby’s parties as a symbol of the corruption of the American Dream; the immoral actions, shallowness of the party guests, and impossibility of his motives reveal the flaws of the American Dream.