Childish Illusions in The Great Gatsby

Imagine that the thing you want most in life turns out to be the thing you despise most. Then picture that in order to discover this disillusioning fact, you have to watch other people destroy themselves in the process of achieving you goal. In his novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald gives a scathing critique of the lavish and foolish lifestyle of affluent Americans, and of the inanity of the American Dream, the dream of equal opportunity for upward mobility--basically, the dream of wealth. The irony of this is that Fitzgerald himself lived like many of the wealthy character in the book, despite his contempt for the lifestyle. The story, narrated by a man named Nick Carraway, who is an aspirant of wealth, follows the quest of Jay Gatsby for Daisy Buchanan through decadent and frivolous parties, ash filled landscapes, and sinful cities, all during one summer in the 1920’s. Nick is in the East, where the story occurs, seeking his own fortune, when, in an effort to escape loneliness, he becomes involved with several very wealthy people and their childish dramas. By observing their mistakes and their fates, Nick becomes disillusioned about what wealth really means, and thus, in the end, decides to return to the West. Through the desperate striving and crushing disillusionment of key characters, Fitzgerald conveys his belief that the American Dream is an alluring, yet childish illusion.

Using both Gatsby and Nick’s attraction to wealth, Fitzgerald shows how the American Dream is an entrancing enticement, full of shiny silver and gold and an almost irresistible allure, and thus how so many people become transfixed by its promises and lured into desperate effort to attain it. The first time Nick every sees him, Gatsby is standing alone in the dark, “[stretching] his arms towards the dark water in a curious way….[toward a] single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock” (20). It is no accident that the light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock is green: green is the color of money. Using the light as a metaphor for wealth, Fitzgerald portrays Gatsby as a man who has fallen under the spell of the American Dream, and is drawn inexorably to it, like a moth to a flame. It is also no accident that the green light belongs to Daisy, whose charm is most prominently found in her voice which is “full of money” (120). By comparing Daisy to money, which Fitzgerald portrays as analogous to the American Dream, Gatsby is thus, from the beginning, characterized as a man who is mesmerized by the attraction of wealth, and is drawn to it just as he is drawn to the green light that to him represents Daisy, and in effect, the American Dream itself. Like Gatsby, Nick is enticed by the glamour of wealth, the pursuit of which is the reason he has travelled to the East, “permanently, [he] thought” (3), to where the story takes place. By positioning him is West Egg, on the Long Island Sound, along with Gatsby, directly across from East Egg, where all the people from ‘old money’ live, and from whence shines Daisy’s green light, Fitzgerald not only links Nick’s desire for affluence with Gatsby’s pursuit of the American Dream, but also shows that both characters are misfits in the world of wealth, both believing that the grass is greener on the other side of the bay. However, as Paul Giles puts it in his article “A Good Gatsby”, “[t]he overriding theme of the book is not greed or money, but the nature of perception: how Gatsby projects and distorts Daisy, and how Nick….in turn interprets Gatsby” (Giles, Paul). Nick is fascinated with the American Dream, but unlike Gatsby, he is not obsessed with it; he is both “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life” (35). Because of this, Fitzgerald is able to use him as an outside perspective on the world in which Gatsby strives to attain the “promises of life” (2), that the American Dream seems to offer.

Through Nick, Fitzgerald shows that despite the American Dream’s attractiveness, pursuing it leads only to discontent because it does not guarantee the perfect life that it seems to promise. This is shown by Nick’s realization of Tom and Daisy’s unhappy marriage and of Gatsby’s unwillingness to give up his desperate and futile pursuit of a relationship that is long gone. Tom and Daisy seem to have everything: enormous wealth, high social status, and an elaborate mansion--in short, perfect economic freedom. But despite their affluence and their seemingly perfect life, they are both deeply discontent. Nick begins to see this when Daisy confides to him that “[she’s] had a very bad time….and [is] pretty cynical about everything” (16). His comprehension of Tom’s infidelity with Myrtle further opens his eyes to the unhappiness shared by Tom and Daisy, despite their luxurious lifestyle. Though Daisy originally loved Gatsby solely, Tom’s money eventually bewitched her, and once his “pearls were around her neck….the incident was over” (76), as if the pearls were the chains which tied Daisy to Tom, rendering her unable to break free, despite her misery. While this failing relationship begins to reveal to him the shortcomings of wealth, Nick still feels that prosperity allows “anything [to] happen….anything at all” (69), until he realizes in the end that even Gatsby’s wealth cannot win him back the crowning jewel to his fantasy: the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, the “golden girl” (120). In his essay “The Great Party-Crasher”, Philip D. Beidler eloquently describes Gatsby’s actions in:

“wooing [Daisy] with his frenzied pursuit of status, money, possessions… [and by coming] up with a preposterous, even mad concoction of a postwar identity, his wealth, his house….his legendary parties. He is Jay Gatsby. And it is all for the girl he remembers from before the war as Daisy Fay”. (Beidler, Philip D)

Even though Gatsby now has the money Daisy always wanted, she is too caught up in the extreme upper class lifestyle that she has built around her herself to sink down into the arms of a crime-ridden--albeit wealthy--bootlegger, despite the “well-forgotten dreams” (135) she carries around with her. During the heated argument at the Plaza Hotel, when Daisy’s “frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage she had had, were definitely gone” (135), we see that Gatsby’s ultimate failure to regain Daisy and complete his fantasy of the American Dream in spite of his desperate efforts conveys Fitzgerald’s belief that the promises of the American Dream are empty, because in the end, wealth does not guarantee happiness.

Through Nick’s disillusionment, when, through Gatsby, he recognizes both the failure of the American Dream to fulfill its promises and the immaturity of its pursuit, Fitzgerald expresses his belief that the Dream is merely a childish illusion. From a young age, Gatsby had been discontent with his family, never accepting the life of the poor farmer he had been born to, and spending much of his childhood dreaming of his “destiny” (99) and “future glory” (98). As a boy, he fantasized about being wealthy, and dreamt of the day when “James Gatz” (98) would become Jay Gatsby. While this fantasy was fine for a child, Gatsby never gives it up, and refuses to face reality despite being well into adulthood; he had “invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end” (98). Gatsby’s unwillingness to give up his childhood fantasy of wealth suggests that the American Dream is just that: a child’s invention sought after by desperate adults who are unwilling to accept reality. In her article “In Ecstatic Cahoots”, Winifred Farrant Bevilacqua points out that, like children, Gatsby is inherently selfish. She asserts that “[an] ideal form arising from Nick and Gatsby’s author-hero relation is that of ‘Romantic character’. In contrast to the biographical hero, this hero’s life-organizing force is an intensely personal, interior truth which arises from his I-for-myself and is kept hidden from the world of others” (Bevilacqua, Winifred Farrant). Gatsby does not bring his family to live with him after he becomes wealthy. In fact, he doesn’t even contact his family, because of his intense fear that association with his roots will destroy the persona he has built up. Gatsby has spent his who life in pursuit of the American Dream, forever trying to distance himself from what Nick notes are the “hot struggles of the poor” (150). Fitzgerald conveys this by associating Gatsby with water, as if Gatsby is trying to cool himself down in his attempt to disassociate himself from his origins and be something he is not, as shown when he rows out across Little Girl Bay to Dan Cody’s Yacht, “the beginning of his career” (98) as Jay Gatsby. In this scene, as part of his transition away from poverty, he both finds a mentor to teach him the ways of the wealthy and surrounds himself with the cooling influence of the bay. However, as Maggie Froehlich states in her article “Gatsby's Mentors: Queer Relations Between Love and Money in The Great Gatsby”, “[m]entoring introduces boys to corruption, if only of the economic kind, and opens them to exploitation by older men” (Froehlich, Maggie Gordon). Though Gatsby succeeds in deluding Daisy into believing he is “always so cool” (119), Nick starts to see through the mask of his greatness in the scene when Gatsby first reunites with Daisy and reveals the nervous, uncertain, self-doubting child that lies beneath the surface, and begins, as Nick notes, to “[act] like a little boy” (88). In the end, Nick discovers what really happens to people who strive for the American Dream. He realizes through Gatsby’s ultimate demise the foolishness in chasing a fantasy, which, to Gatsby, “must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it….[but he] did not know that it was already behind him” (180). Fitzgerald conveys Nick’s final disillusionment when Nick reflects in the end that “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us….[and that it] eluded us then, but that’s no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther” (180). He comes to understand that just as every day Gatsby got farther away from age seventeen, and this from his childhood fantasies, every day each of us gets further away from the American Dream. Some might argue that because Gatsby took the time to “leave word with the butler that if any one phoned word was to be brought to him at the pool” (161), he still believed that Daisy loved him, and this that the American Dream was still within his reach. As Peter Hays points out in his essay “Oxymoron in The Great Gatsby”, “he….foolishly believes that the money he has earned erases much of [the] social gap [between them]” (Hays, Peter L). However, because Daisy and Tom promptly moved out of their house in East Egg and turned away from the tragedies of Myrtle’s, Gatsby’s, and Wilson’s deaths, we know that Daisy no longer loved Gatsby, and no longer wanted to leave Tom. From this we can see that in the end, the only thing Gatsby succeeded in was the perpetuation of his illusion that the American Dream is, in fact, an attainable reality.

Using mainly Nick’s disillusionment that the desperate attempts to gain wealth and social status only lead to discontentment, Fitzgerald expresses his belief that the American Dream is a child’s fantasy full of empty promises. Gatsby’s portrayal as a moth attracted to the green flame of money shows how transfixing the idea of the American Dream is, and how it can lure people into spending their whole lives in pursuit of it. Though wealth seems to promise a life of freedom and happiness, Nick sees that in fact, wealth imprisons people, keeping them tied to their lifestyles even when it makes them miserable and prevents them from being with the people they love. By comparing the American Dream to a childhood fantasy, Fitzgerald demonstrates the immaturity of its pursuit. Through Gatsby’s story and Nick’s consequent disillusionment, we can see the foolishness on spending our lives in pursuit of money, because money does not guarantee happiness, and in the end, happiness is all anyone wants.

Works Cited

Beidler, Philip D. "The Great Party-Crasher: Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby, and the Cultures of World War I Remembrance." War, Literature, and the Arts (n.d.): 1-23. http://wlajournal.com/25_1/pdf/Beidler.pdf.

Bevilacqua, Winifred Farrant. "In Ecstatic Cahoots: Nick's Authoring of Gatsby." Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies (2010): 49.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby / by F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.

Froehlich, Maggie Gordon. "Gatsby’s Mentors: Queer Relations Between Love and Money in The Great Gatsby." Journal of Men's Studies (2011): 209-24.

Giles, Paul. "A Good - Gatsby Baz Luhrmann Undomesticates Fitzgerald." Commonwealth (2013): 12-15.

Hays, Peter L. "Oxymoron in "The Great Gatsby"" Papers on Language & Literature 47.3 (2011): 318-25.