The Great Gatsby Ambition

Barack Obama had once stated, “We may come from different places and have different stories, but we share common hope, and one very American Dream.” The American Dream is a desire everyone strives for and differs from one individual to the next. To some people, it means being financially successful while for others, it just means being able to achieve happiness. In other words, it is a complicated concept where it seems one needs to demonstrate ambition in order to be able to achieve a better and prosperous life. However, this is not entirely true. In the novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the ideal image of the American Dream is something sought after by the main character, Jay Gatsby. His whole life, he was ambitious and

He was very ambitious at a young age and spent his whole life trying to find a way out of the bleak future that was waiting for him. At the age of seventeen, he left his home to pursue his dream with Dan Cody, an extremely wealthy old sailor who plays a large role in how Gatsby’s future will turn out. From the beginning, Gatsby knew that the “yacht represented all the beauty and glamor in the world” (Fitzgerald 106) and took advantage of this opportunity in order to start a new, more sophisticated life that met and exceeded beyond the approval of Dan Cody. However this was not enough to reach his ideal life so Jay Gatsby resorted to illegal activities such as bootlegging and owning drug stores where “He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drug stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter,” to earn his millions of dollars (Fitzgerald 141). Although a lot of determination and hard work were put into achieving this goal, corruption and illegal activity does not conform to the idea of the “American Dream.” In the end, Gatsby did end up reaching the so called “American Dream” since he was absolutely wealthy and had his own mansion but it did not end up