American Dream and The Great Gatsby

American Dream and The Great Gatsby research paper due and don't know how to start it? How about like this?

The phrase "The American Dream" has become a sort of cliche. But the very fact that Americans still speak of and believe in something they call the American Dream gives rise to the idea that there is a promise in American life, and the dream is achieving what our interpretation of that promise is.Knowing that, it is important to understand that the American Dream changes from time to time. The circumstances of America give rise to different perspectives on America. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman provide two different interpretations of the American Dream.

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is the novel of the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age. Not only does the decade stand in direct contrast to the Great Depression that followed like night follows day, but the period has a frantic character to it, as people got rich, got drunk and lived for the moment. This is the zeitgeist captured in Gatsby. "The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot".

Gatsby is the American Dream

Gatsby is the epitome of an American Dream for the following reasons:

• Gatsby is a self-made man
• Gatsby is full of easy money and a casual lifestyle
• Gatsby has made something of himself
• Gatsby's American Dream is achieving the good life.

That he is a bootlegger, with intimate ties to the underground, is not seen with disdain in the novel. Wolfsheim remembers a Gatsby fresh out of the war "so hard up he had to keep wearing his uniform because he couldn't buy some regular clothes".