gatdream Corruption of the Dream in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby :: Great Gatsby Essays

Corruption of the Dream in The Great Gatsby The the Statesn Dream describes an billet of hope and faith that looks forward to the fulfillment of human wishes and desires. What these wishes are, were expressed in Thomas Jeffersons Declaration of Independence of 1776, where it was stated We hold these truths to be self-evident, that only men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with plastered unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of comfort. This search for freedom and happiness actually goes back to the very beginning of American civilization, to the time of the inaugural settlers. The first base settlers were all religious refugees who were driven to the New World by persecution. To these people, America represented a new life of freedom, holding a promise of spiritual and material happiness. For those settlers who were not so religiously inclined, America was compose a fairyland, a land of great possibilities. And so the first thirteen colonies came into being, amidst the religious and materialistic hopes of the first settlers. Material prosperity and jump on kept pace with religious and spiritual goals because the Puritans and the Quakers alike approved of sedulousness and material advancement. For, whereas physical pleasures were evil, hard work and achievements were regarded as indications of inner goodness. When the easterly Seaboard, comprising the thirteen colonies, became overcrowded, the settlers began to move west. The opening of the Middle and Western States increased the sense experience of hope and faith. And this looking forward beyond the immediate present, this belief in the future, has become a national characteristic that may partly formulate the speed of American advancement in so many areas of activities. The participatory system, first voiced in Jeffersons Declaration of Independence in 1776, may be traced to this basic attitude of hope and confidence. The American Dream , however, originally relates to a desire for spiritual and material improvement. What happened was that, from one point of few, the material verbal expression of the dream was too easily and too quickly achieved, with the result that it presently outpaced and even obliterated the early spiritual ideals. So there emerged a state of material well being but lacking in spiritual life or purpose. So that when Fitzgerald produced Gatsby, modeled no dubiousness on the writers own faith in life, he seemed to have created a character who represented an early American in whom the Dream was still very much alive.