The American Dream is the promise of the perfect life and having everything you ever wanted including money. It is made out to believe that if you work and try hard enough, you can achieve it. Throughout The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it is revealed the the American Dream is unattainable and false. By just doing honest work, you will not achieve the American dream. The main settings used in the text display the real challenges of the American dream and what it actually means. East Egg represents the illusion of the American dream, West Egg represents the achievement of the American Dream through corruption and the Valley of Ashes represents the unattainability of the American Dream. Through the use of these three settings, F. Scott Fitzgerald shows us the failure of the American Dream and what it is supposed to represent.
The American dream is supposed to inspire hope in those who are trying hard to achieve it. Through the setting of East Egg, Fitzgerald portrays the false achievement of the American Dream. The people who live in West Egg are seen to have the perfect life and have everything they could ever need, for example, money. People are inspired by them and want to live their lives like the people of higher status. But it is not as it seems. People from East Egg are know as old money. This means that they were born into money and never really worked for it. Because they were born into a higher status, they think that they are better than everyone else and this is show when Tom Buchanan says, “Oh I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,… I’d be a goddamn fool to live anywhere else.” By saying this, he is telling us that if you live anywhere else, you are not as good as them and that East Egg is the best place to live and only the elite can live there. East Egg is described as pristine and perfect as “the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water.” Because the people of East Egg were born into money, they never had to do anything to earn it and achieve what people think is the American Dream so it provides the false hope in people of a lower status that if they work hard enough they can also achieve the American Dream. This is not true because the people of East Egg may seem like they achieved the American Dream on their own but they never did and was born into it.
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