Scott Fitzgerald's highly accomplished novel, The American Dream, he portrays the longing for the American Dream as a significant part of ones life, very familiar to society as a corrupted essence of reality and ideals that the characters, especially Jay Gatsby, truly represent. The question saunters, what truly is the corruption of the American Dream? In The Great Gatsby, the longing for the real American Dream---a simple white picket fence, a perfect family, a true love, and security---is not uncommon, but the corruption is characterized by greed and overpowered by money and material wealth. Gatsby's one lingering hope throughout his entire life was set upon winning Daisy with his materialistic values, and his life ended tragically as he soon would learn the rough truth that reality would reveal. From Gatsby wasting his entire life and money on hope of Daisy's return and Myrtle wanting to leave her whole past for Tom, to the artificial fantasy of a perfect life that the Buchanan's appear to have, the most important figures throughout the story represents corruption in one way or another. As people may hold their driven aspirations to live a perfect life, the realization that money and materialistic items have no true value in living the American Dream but it is solely how one goes about their life living each day to its fullest and the achievement of true happiness without substance and genuine love with or without commitment.
The American Dream is a universal hope familiar to our society and characters in the book consisting of aspirations of a perfect life and achievements. In the novel, The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway quotes, "Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.