Gatsby

The American Dream is seen in many different ways. The dream of the Americans today is different than the Americans in the 1900’s. In the early years of the 1900’s the American Dream was perceived at freedom and as immigrants coming here for freedom. As the years went on a couple decades later the dream changed to money and power. This changed the values of the Americans to possessions and making money, which made them greedier, and want more. The story of the “The Great Gatsby” F. Scott Fitzgerald narrates the life of Nick who is caught up in the middle of the wealth and greed his friends are going through.

As the values change for Americans the author shows this through a series of events that makes it very clear that the lifestyle was different. Fitzgerald shows the how different the rich act than the poor and how women don’t love the men for who they are only what they have. Fitzgerald uses a symbol in the book to represent god looking over the characters by a billboard with eyes looking over this run down city called the city of ashes. Tom and Gatsby represent the rich as the main characters and Gatsby has these extravagant parties while tom is cheating on his wife with a poor woman from this city of ashes. The billboard is referred to many times in the book to signify that god is always watching what they are doing.The locations of Gatsby and Tom are very different because Gatsby lives in the new money town and Tom lives in the old money. This shows how their type of money classified people and not just by whom they were.

Another way the American Dream was changed was the way women saw the men. In the book Tom is cheating on his wife Daisy for this poor woman who is married to a man of the same class as her. The only reason why she is with Tom is because he is so wealthy and he buys her whatever she wants. Gatsby, who is in love with Daisy Toms wife, throws these big parties to get the attention of Daisy. The way he gets her attention is by spending money and she only likes him for his class. If Gatsby didn’t have as much money as he did then Daisy would not have noticed him. Tom who is cheating on his wife thinks he is tough and he can do whatever he wants. He has the reputation of kind of a hard ass who gets away whit everything. When he gets pulled over by a cop he just flashes a card and the cop says sorry and walks away. Also he breaks the woman’s nose he is cheating on. This symbolizes his power that he has in the book.

The way Fitzgerald writes the book is meant to make you think about the little details that are going on for example towards the end of the book the weather is getting really hot when everyone in the story is reaching their boiling points with each other and they are about to explode. The values of the characters have not changed much at all it is just the actions they do to change the way you think of them and that was the point of Fitzgerald. For example Gatsby was very mysterious in the beginning and seemed like this great guy who spent all this money just to have fun. In the end you find out that he didn’t do it for himself but just to get attention. Fitzgerald leaves you thinking what the real meaning and value of the situations mean. Its not a book that you can just read page by page, you need to gather the information from events and link ideas together to gather the real meaning of the book.