“I think the dream has morphed into the pursuit of money: Accumulate enough of it, and the rest will follow,” the famous Astronaut Buzz Aldrin wrote (BrainyQuote). Indeed, the reader is exposed to the true nature of the American Dream through the observations of Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic “The Great Gatsby.” During the great immigrations of the late 1800s, many believed that America was a land of opportunity and that anything was possible. The dream was to better your financial state, increase your happiness, and aspire to the best you could achieve. As the Roaring 20s progressed, the culture of America was changing for the worse and with it came the decline of the American Dream. Citizens, especially those in the east,
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These aristocrats prevented people from leaving their past behind and climbing to a higher social position because they maintained that you can only be born into this class. In order to overcome this, Gatsby created a new identity asserting, “I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition”(65). This was clearly a lie, but he wanted to believe that he could be a person of old money. Another example of the exclusion was illustrated when Tom remarked, “All this old sport business. Where’d you pick that up?”(127). Yet again separating Gatsby from the Buchanans and demonstrating that his attempts to blend into this group were futile. Lasty, the words of Tom deliver the final blow to Gatsby, “She's not leaving me-- Certainly not for a common swindler who'd have to steal the ring he put on her finger “(133). This cements the idea that Gatsby will never be considered good enough for Daisy because he was not born into money. Even Gatsby’s great optimism and wealth were not enough to overcome the class barrier that separated him from
These aristocrats prevented people from leaving their past behind and climbing to a higher social position because they maintained that you can only be born into this class. In order to overcome this, Gatsby created a new identity asserting, “I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition”(65). This was clearly a lie, but he wanted to believe that he could be a person of old money. Another example of the exclusion was illustrated when Tom remarked, “All this old sport business. Where’d you pick that up?”(127). Yet again separating Gatsby from the Buchanans and demonstrating that his attempts to blend into this group were futile. Lasty, the words of Tom deliver the final blow to Gatsby, “She's not leaving me-- Certainly not for a common swindler who'd have to steal the ring he put on her finger “(133). This cements the idea that Gatsby will never be considered good enough for Daisy because he was not born into money. Even Gatsby’s great optimism and wealth were not enough to overcome the class barrier that separated him from