p4ex
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby presents a tragic hero, Jay Gatsby, who nearly succeeds in reclaiming his lost love by pursuing an uncorrupted, yet unattainable dream with sensitivity and care, hurting no one but himself, and ultimately losing everything. In the novel, Fitzgerald shows through the actions of his characters how the American dream has become corrupted by greed, selfishness, carelessness, and immorality. The novel demonstrates that the careless and immoral quest for wealth by those characters can lead to unhappiness and even death. Gatsby, who pursues a relatively uncorrupt version of the American dream with sensitivity and care fares no better than Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane who pursues his corrupted dream with carelessness and insensitivity. Fitzgerald makes a strong case that the modern American dream as corrupted is unattainable. Many would challenge that viewpoint, and there are convincing arguments for each view. However, on close examination, it is clear that the American dream has morphed into an unattainable fiction that destroys people, corrupts society, and threatens its very destruction. First, Fitzgerald uses the characters in the novel to demonstrate how the American dream has become corrupted by the careless pursuit of money as an end in itself. Simply said, the American dream is the inherent right of all people to pursue happiness and prosperity free of oppression and persecution. In the novel, Fitzgerald demonstrates that the American dream has become corrupted, and thus destroyed, by an immoral, greedy, and selfish quest for wealth and material possessions. Fitzgerald relates the corruption of the American dream to several main characters, including Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, and Tom Buchanan, who have each consciously and deliberately forsaken traditional values of honor and virtue in favor of a profligate lifestyle of excess, immorality, and carelessness. Taken to the extreme, the greed and