Swami Vivekananda advises those who seek eminence to "Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life; dream of it; think of it; live on that idea. Let the brain, the body, muscles, nerves, every part of your body be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone." Romantic as this may seem, there are consequences that come in its stead. Placing too much significance on dreams causes a person to misguidedly equate his identity with his desire to attain those dreams. Common themes in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, James Thurber's short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story Winter Dreams establish that infatuation with dreams causes conflict, confusion, and loss of identity. .
In Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, protagonist Jay Gatsby assumes an alias and conceals his past in order to attain opulence, resulting in the equivocation of his identity. For Gatsby, or Gatz as he was once known, the past was a barrier to an ostentatious future, and how he looked upon poverty with disdain- Gatsby dropped out of St. Olaf's College within the first two weeks he was there because he could not bear the "lowly occupation" with which he paid his tuition. Rising from an impoverished childhood in North Dakota to become fabulously rich, Gatsby embodies the 'rags to riches' motif, a tell-tale characteristic of New Money during the Roaring Twenties. In an attempt to live the American Dream, Gatsby partakes in unlawful activity and abandons his past. Despite Gatsby's effort to conceal his social origins, with time his history is uncovered by Nick:.
I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.