How it is portrayed in The Great Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby is a novel published in 1925, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and is narrated by a character named Nick Carraway. The story follows a man named Jay Gatsby, who is Nick's neighbour; he is a man who has wrapped his life within the past five years around his sole desire to be with a woman named Daisy Buchanan. The Great Gatsby is a novel of tragedy, love and rich vs. poor. In this novel, the American Dream is a concept that is consistent throughout the entire story. The author portrays the concept to the readers to show that people will go through many levels of extreme situations to ultimately achieve what is known as the American Dream at that period in time. Fitzgerald shows this through several different examples of literary devices and elements of fiction, but the three that made his portrayal of the concept stand out the most were symbolism, motifs, and setting. .
The first literary device used to portray Fitzgerald's view of the concept of the American Dream was symbolism. In the novel, the symbol of the green light is mentioned many times. At the end of the novel, Nick says: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter-to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther and one fine morning- " (pg. 180). The green light symbolises Gatsby desiring Daisy, and the hope that he will get her. Gatsby used the American Dream to try and achieve Daisy, because ultimately, that is what Daisy wanted. .
In the novel, Fitzgerald also uses quite a few obvious motifs to depict what his notion of the American Dream is. One of the motifs used was dishonesty, more specifically, dishonesty of the rich. In Chapter 3, Jordan mentions that she cheated in a golf tournament to win and Nick thinks about what kind of person she is: "Jordan Baker avoided instinctively clever, shrewd men, and I now saw this because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible.
