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    GATSBY, FITZGERALD AND FAILURE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

    Number of Pages: 6

     

    Summary of the research paper:

    This essay examines how writer F. Scott Fitzgerald demonstrated the death of the American Dream, both through his character, Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, and himself. This is an argumentative essay, with the premise that Fitzgerald, himself, embodied the failure of the American Dream through his actions and his marriage. Bibilography lists 7 sources.

    Name of Research Paper File: D0_MTgatsam.rtf

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    women or money. Fitzgerald is living proof of the writer who writes what he knows - his own life and history could have read like a storyline in one of  his novels. In fact, although The Great Gatsby was written before Fitzgerald faced some of the more severe crisis of his life, its safe to say that Fitzgeralds background and  style of living helped spur the failure of his own American dream, thereby painting the way to The Great Gatsby as representative of failure of the American Dream. In order  to determine exactly how both Jay Gatsby and Scott Fitzgerald suffered from the failings of their own American Dreams, its important to first define what the "American Dream" actually is.  The ultimate definition of the American Dream is difficult to define in this day and age, although experts through the years have attempted to do so. Scholar Brink Lindsey, for  example, sees that the importance of American culture and dream is the sense of adventure (Lindsey 36). Scholar Joseph Epstein, in the meantime, quotes Tocqueville, indicating, "The . . .  thing that strikes one in the United States is the rarity, in a land where all are actively ambitious, of any lofty ambition" (Lindsey 39).  Ambition and a self-made determination, and the freedom to achieve anything that one sets his or her mind to were the basic concepts of the American Dream  - but when it came to the Dream itself, it was up to each individual, as Scott Fitzgerald learned near the end of his life. "I lived with a great  dream," wrote Fitzgerald to his daughter, Scottie, during his latter years, ". . . the dream grew and I learned how to speak of it and make people listen . 

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