The Great Gatsby Essay

Evaluate The Great Gatsby as a criticism of the corruption of the American Dream.

The Great Gatsby. Just the name of this novel has a ring to it, a hint that it is about someone, or something with a good amount of power and importance. Anybody who has the title “the great” preceding their name must be something of great importance, right? At the beginning of this novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby is presented as a mystery man, living none other than what can be specified as the American Dream. He is wealthy, mysterious, handsome, and throws the most prestigious parties in New York on a regular basis. Everybody knows his name, he is the subject of the gossip of young giggling girls who attend his parties but have never actually met him in person. People come from all over the world to experience the festivities that take place at his house. Not only is he well known, he is the perfect gentleman, the type of man who would have a brand new dress personally delivered to a girl after her own dress had gotten torn at one of his get togethers. But one of the lessons that is taught to us in this book by the objective and observant narrator, Nick Carraway is that living this great fantasy is not everything that it seems. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the characters in his classic novel The Great Gatsby to portray that maybe living the American dream is more corrupt than it appears, and is not as wonderful as it seems.
In the beginning of this book, Gatsby has it all. He is charming and wins over pretty much every person he comes in contact with, has what seems like an endless supply of money and an endless supply of time. He has what everyone wants. But as the book continues your view on the fabulous dream life that Gatsby is living starts to change. As the book progresses, the character of Gatsby begins to unravel. It turns out that his entire past is a lie, and that he didn’t in fact finish his education at Oxford, or inherit his money in any respectable way at all. You find out that Gatsby is living the dream based on his mere desire to live the dream, a goal which he set for himself because he was too ashamed of his own boring average life. Thru ought this novel, Fitzgerald demonstrates the idea of perfection, and breaks it down to show that really, there is no such thing. Even “the great” Jay Gatsby, who has the life that everybody in New York wishes that they had, is merely a man using money that he had just recently earned in order to impress a woman, not to mention one who is already married.
This book is also filled with a web of lies and secrets. Gatsby wants to keep his reputation solid, and in order to do that he lies about his past, and makes it sound as though he went through a solid education at one of the most well known and well respected colleges, and worked his way to the top, when really he was a coward and dropped out of Oxford so that he could find a way to make his money faster. This inspires the reader to think that maybe there is no way to really achieve perfection, because the people who seem to have it all always have a background motive or a dishonest past to show that what they’re living is not perfection at all.
Gatsby is not the only character in this book who shows the corruption and downside of living the “good life”. One of the central characters of the book is Daisy Buchanan, a beautiful wealthy young woman married to Tom Buchanan, “one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven”(Fitzgerald, p.22), who came from an incredibly wealthy family and reached the climax of his life at age 21, but still has a big head from the power of his college achievements. On the surface, it appears that Tom and Daisy had it all. They spent a year in France on a whim and “drifted here and there unrestfully whenever people played polo and were rich together” (Fitzgerald, p.23). But despite the happy appearance on the surface, there was nothing happy about this relationship. Tom had a mistress who he would meet with when no one of importance to him was around. Daisy was well aware of this, although she never mentioned it. This was partly because of the deep love she had for Gatsby, which she hid along with her true feelings. By any observer’s speculation, Tom and Daisy were living the American dream, something that everybody wants. But when the truth beneath the surface is revealed, I can’t think of many people who would want to live that way.
At the end of this novel, after all of the mysteries are cleared and the deceiving facades have fallen away, Nick makes an observation about the people who live this fancy and corrupt life. “There were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”(Fitzgerald, p.153). This is one of my favorite lines in the book, it really shows the notion of imperfection that comes with trying to be perfect. Fitzgerald did an excellent job of using the different characters in his book to portray this concept that the “American dream” doesn’t really exist, at least not without a price.