GATSBY ESSAY – CRITICIZING THE DREAM OF SOCIETY ll

The Great Gatsby, The Great American Novel, the critique of society, exposing the hopes and views of the dream and how it really doesn’t exist. Its evident in New York, You can be who you want for a day the illusion of the dream and the escape, The Valley of Ashes live the people that think they will get their because their eyes are masked with the hope of societies dream. East Egg ‘Old Money’ is about how it doesn’t exist to them they walk around like they run the place and everyone is there for them. The Dream is the hope that anyone, gender, race, nationality and class can ‘make it’ in the world if they work hard enough.

My views on how society is criticized in the Valley of Ashes is how its a failure to the place and the people who live there, they are masked by the belief that they can make it and one day they will do it, and can not see that they are just souls rotting away as moral decay

The Valley of Ashes represent the people who are masked by the dream, they can not see that they will never get there and they symbolise the moral decay of people’s souls rotting away, they never reap the rewards of their hard work. It Also represents the outcome of America’s obsession with wealth and material things, this is shown when Nick describes the Valley of Ashes “A fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”  Those men who are crumbling through the powdery air,  are those who can not see and will not be able to make it no matter how hard they try, this is the part of society that has been left behind.

New York, like vegas but classier anything can happen there, even white cab drivers driving black passengers. New York was that place, the place where things were different, you didn’t have to be you, you could just put on a different outfit and get away from reality, from the strain of the dream. “Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge… Even Gatsby” The dream doesn’t exist there.

East Egg is full of stuck up snobs who’s money is “old” meaning they’ve been there for a while and believe they have achieved the dream and are above it, Fitzgerald is criticising those who think they are elite to society and are above the rules, the dream doesn’t exist to them and he is criticising how out of balance society is and 100 years later we still haven’t changed.

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