Themes Of The American Dream In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

In the novel, The Great Gatsby, the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, educates young adults about the widely known American Dream. The story begins with the narrator, Nick Carraway, moving to New York in hopes of fulfilling the American Dream. Nick becomes interested in a particular character, Jay Gatsby, who constantly tries to win over Daisy Buchanan, a woman of his past, by hosting several lavish parties in hopes that she will notice him. Eventually, Gatsby is let down by the promises of the American Dream that is built off of ideals of the past and has proven to be impossible to achieve with wealth.
An important recurring motif, the colors gold and yellow, argue that the American Dream is a fraud depicting deceitful happiness. When Gatsby and

Gatsby’s luxurious Rolls-Royce is an automobile that symbolizes wealth and high class, but is compared to a “yellow bug”. Besides happiness, yellow is a counterfeit compared to the genuine gold. Gatsby drives around a Rolls-Royce but he goes around shuttling people to his parties, making his fancy car seem as if it was a regular yellow bug giving the people of the working class a fictitious feeling of happiness. The author shows that Gatsby’s actions outcast him to the old money status. This emphasizes that wealth does not give you superiority, only the old money status. Gatsby also describes Daisy’s voice by comparing it to riches. “‘Her voice is full of money,’... I’d never understood before. It was full of money - that as the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it… High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…” (Chapter 7, 120). Daisy, Gatsby’s ideal wife, is described as royalty. She lives in a “white palace” with the “king’s daughter” making her the “golden

“This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air” (Chapter 2, 23). Symbolizing the working class, it is written with negative connotation using words such as, “grotesque" and “crumbling”. Ashes are usually the color grey, which helps to understand the valley of ashes is an unpleasant place to live as grey symbolizes lifelessness. The valley of ashes is the end result of risking one’s life for the American Dream. In addition, people who live in the valley of ashes show “transcendent effort” stressing that hard work does not pay off; the American Dream is a deception. Furthermore, when people start to finally understand Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes, “But I can still read the grey names and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him (Chapter 4, 61). The words “grey names” specifically indicate people from the valley of ashes. These people have lost hope in achieving the goal they yearned to obtain. Following up, the people that went to Gatsby’s parties knew “nothing whatever about him”. This