The Great Gatsby and the American Dream .
For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
- 1 Timothy 6:10 -.
As people, we do not realize what kinds of sorrows we bring upon ourselves. All the want, the greed, the needs, add together to make our lives miserable. There is a shortage of non-materialistic people in the world today because we have grown up with the idea that the more we possess the higher up in society we rank. Booker T. Washington said, "I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."" It is the society in which we grew up in that causes such things to seem ludicrous to many. This mindset was started in the Roaring Twenties right after World War I, with people buying on margin and going further into debt just to obtain the latest technologies. Proof of this materialist thought comes from the book "The Great Gatsby- by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The protagonist, Jay Gatsby, is plagued everyday for five years by the memory that he was unable to marry the woman of his dreams. His goal in life becomes marrying Daisy. In his quest for this goal, Gatsby interconnects fantasy and reality becoming unable to distinguish the two. In the end his pursuit causes him to fall in love with money because of its overwhelming presence within his dream. In his book "The Great Gatsby-, using the character of Gatsby, Fitzgerald shows how Gatsby's dream led to his irresistible need for material wealth, ultimately leading to the death of a great man.
The main character in the book, Jay Gatsby, was affluent, but it was all part of a dream, a dream that never expires, a dream that stayed with Gatsby till his dying day. Gatsby's dream was not to become rich but to marry Daisy. Gatsby always thought of Daisy as the one thing in his life that he worked for.