Ensayo Gran Gatsby (inglés)

The Great Gatsby: The Ultimate American Dream.

This book represents the common idea of the American dream.  Hard work and ambition are the key points of success, or at least from this perspective. For this novel, the author takes care of pointing out several subjects, but the most significant ones are related to the breaking of the American dream. This is usually depicted as someone coming from humble backgrounds, working hard to reach richness and wealth, a social level recognition. The desire to reach such dream can only be reached if we work hard enough and towards the right direction. The dream is pictured as a self-sufficient person.

In the novel we see what happens to the American dream during the 1920’s, which is an era of corruption and violence in certain areas of the U.S. country. It is here that we can see that the American dream is only a matter of “getting”, instead of “doing”. One good example are Myrtle and Daisy, having been destroyed by the dream of a life filled with lux. Myrtle is driven into having an affair with Tom, Daisy’s husband, which causes trouble in her current marriage, leading her to her own death and to lose her happiness.

Myrtle enjoyed reading about famous people and events, which only made her covet a life of riches and fame. This is also the reason for her to start an affair with Tom, because to her, he represents the idea of the life she’s looking for. When she married her husband, George, she thought herself madly in love and believed to be happy with him. She says that the only cray thing she ever did was to actually marry this man, since at the time of the wedding, she was not aware that her husband-to-be had borrowed his outfit for the wedding. She shows herself as a materialistic person from the start. Myrtle looks at Tom in a different way, like someone who can actually afford to have stuff of their own, and as someone who has money and has everything to represent the American dream.

Myrtle’s affair with Tom, soon causes chaos to invade her life, being hit by Daisy’s car. What an irony. We can see that the greediness for that “precious” American dream can literally destroy someone’s life.

Daisy wished for happiness, but she believed to have married the wrong man; as soon as she confirmed it, she had a new perspective of her life. Tom had been abusive towards his wife and does not show too much care for her. Daisy believes to have everything she could ask for in life, as far as her idea of the American dream goes, only to discover that she could not be more wrong. When her child was born, she mentioned that she wished for her to be a fool, a beautiful fool, which in her mind, that is the best thing a girl can be when thinking about the limited possibilities for women in that era.

With Gatsby, Daisy realizes she had married for money and not for love. She realizes she could have married Gatsby for money and love at the same time. Gatsby shows us that his ambition for Daisy’s love drove him away from everything else, because Daisy is his actual dream, but back to the times when they had met, Daisy had money and Gatsby had none. He went to war to fight and to gain money in order to be able to give her anything she could ever possibly want. While he was away, Daisy married Tom.

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