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How The Great Gatsby Challenges the American Dream

Everyone dreams about becoming successful. We are often told that hard work pays off, that you have to work in order to make a fortune. We spend our days going to work and going to school, just to get the satisfaction of knowing that the work paid off. This is the forefront of the American Dream: The idea that through hard work, one will become successful and wealthy. In the United States, the American Dream plays a big role in day to day life. While running for president in 2007, former president Obama said that “What is unique about America is that we want these dreams for more than ourselves - we want them for each other. That's why we call it the American dream.” Historically, initiatives created by presidents such as the New Deal helped give economic equity in America.

This hard work is shown in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Narrated by Nick Carraway, the movie follows Jay Gatsby, a poor farmer from North Dakota, who worked hard to achieve an unimaginable amount of wealth, often hosting extravagant parties for New York City. Despite having everything, Gatsby still has one objective: to “repeat the past” and reunite with his lost love, Daisy Buchanan. He showed Daisy all he had, including showing all the wealth he was able to achieve. Unfortunately, after a fight with Daisy’s husband, Tom, Gatsby was never able to win over Daisy. When Daisy accidentally killed Myrtle, Tom’s mistress, Gatsby took the blame to further impress Daisy, leading to his death. This story ventures in the good and bad of achieving the American Dream during one of the most prosperous periods in American history. Today, The Great Gatsby is seen as one of the earliest critiques of the American Dream, with many play, musical and movie adaptations including Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 version.

Jamie Muscato as Jay Gatsby in the Boardway adaptation of The Great Gatsby

In this series of blogs, I am going to take a look into the characters - both main and background characters - and the historical context of the 2013 version of The Great Gatsby to understand the extent to which the American Dream is still achievable and the consequences that wealth provides. In The Great Gatsby, the character’s attempts of achieving the American Dream demonstrates how achieving the Dream may not be possible at all. It also looks into the disruptive effects of wealth, accurately critiquing those who are pursuing or have achieved their own American Dream.

#the great gatsby #the american dream #money #social mobility

The Ashy Limbo and Seeing People For Who They Are

The American Dream promises that hard work will pay off in the form of success and prosperity. This concept plays a big role in American society. If one does well in school, gets good grades and a good job, they wouldn’t spend the rest of their life working at a minimum wage job. However, The Great Gatsby proves that the American Dream is not as guaranteed as people suggest. Throughout the movie, the Valley of Ashes emphasizes that there are people who cannot achieve the American Dream, not because of lack of effort, but because they were in a situation where it is impossible for them to achieve it.

Today, it seems as though accomplishing the American Dream is impossible as people are increasingly unlikely to accomplish the American Dream. This can be due to rising inflation, rising cost for higher education and the cost of owning a home increasing. As Kaleigh White, writer of The Campus puts it: “We can no longer afford the lives our parents led, or the lives their parents led during the birth of ‘the American Dream.’” (White 2021). In 2024, a survey done by Pew Research Center found that 47% of people believe that the American Dream either was or was never possible. Additionally, when asked about the American Dream, they found that almost a third of people asked believe that the Dream is out of reach for them (Borelli, 2024).

From the Pew Research Center

The idea that constantly working will improve one’s life is an oversimplification of how to be successful. It undermines the reality that life is not fair, there are limitations put in place to achieve everything one would want. This viewpoint impacts us everyday because it views those who don’t achieve success (or are financially unstable or even homeless) as lazy people who refuse to work. In reality, there are many other factors that can cause financial instability, not just refusing to work. Like the people in the Valley of Ashes, they do everything they can to make progress on the American Dream. They work hard, but are stuck in a dark, depressing limbo with little to no social mobility. Realistically, it will be almost impossible for people in the Valley of Ashes to achieve the American Dream, as it requires an investment in family, healthcare and education that no one can afford.

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Like Nick, many people from across the world immigrate to the United States because it is seen as an opportunity to become wealthy. However, sometimes achieving that wealth may not be the best. In Nick’s case, he did not achieve his American Dream of becoming wealthy, as the recklessness of the wealthy disgusted him so much that he moved out. Nick’s character arc throughout the movie emphasizes that while achieving the American Dream may seem promising, it is never worth it to sacrifice one’s character in exchange for it.

Nick in the opening scene, coming into Wall Street

Initially, Nick moved to New York to learn how to learn about bond business. Throughout the beginning, he was in awe of New York. It was there where he was exposed to many extravagant parties hosted by Gatsby. He got to meet Gatsby, and helped him reunite with Daisy. Unfortunately, that did not last. When Myrtle was killed, George (Myrtle’s husband) assumed that Gatsby killed her. This led to George killing Gatsby as revenge. At Gatsby’s funeral, only Nick came.

The lack of care of Gatsby after his death exposes how the wealthy did not care for him. In an experiment done by the University of California Berkeley, they had two participants play a game of Monopoly. However, one of the participants was given more privileges (such as more money at the start) than the other. As the game went on, the richer player showed “dominance and displays of power” and inevitably won the game. They found that “as a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down” (Piff, 2014). This is most evidently seen in how Tom and Daisy reacted to Gatsby’s death. Instead of going to his funeral, they both moved out of New York.

Gatsby's Casket

Nick is the only character to see Gatsby more than just a rich man that throws lavish parties, he sees him as an ambitious man who worked hard to get where he is. However, the public were not interested in seeing Gatsby more than the person who “killed” Myrtle. The reaction to Gatsby’s death, especially Daisy’s, created disillusionment in Nick from achieving wealth. It was at that moment that Nick knew that achieving great wealth leads to decreased compassion for others. Nick, a man who “always [tries] to see the best in people”, decided that it was not worth it to sacrifice his humanity and empathy in exchange for overindulgence and carelessness all for the sake of achieving his American Dream. In the last scene of the movie, Nick shows that he kept his humanity. He created a memoir to honor Gatsby’s death. Nick’s story shows that even though achieving one’s dreams is promising, the corrupting nature of being wealthy emphasizes that it is not worth it.

Nick, typing his memoir about Gatsby

#social mobility #wealth inequality #equal opportunity

Social mobility may have provoked headaches among England's upper ranks, but it was rather more normal than most contemporary books of manners and courtesy let on: after all, these were books attempting to order society into a comprehensible ranking system. Occasionally, though, the messy reality of life defeated the authors of such tracts.

Thomas Penn, The Brothers York

One thing that is troubling to me is there are no more entry-level jobs for people with entry-level skills, that is, positions that have historically been at businesses where employees could rise and climb the ladder – ones that foster economic mobility with less job insecurity. Those opportunities seem to be missing because those kinds of entry-level jobs, like at manufacturing facilities, require you to have mid-level skills even to get your foot in the door.

—Congresswoman Gwen Moore

#employment #economic mobility #social mobility #the american dream #labor market #job market