The Great Gatsby: A Level York Notes

At the end of the book Jay Gatsby dies, and his dream dies too. He has a dream that can never be fulfilled. In order to win Daisy’s love he becomes a self-made man and surrounds himself with lots of possessions, many of them from Europe to impress her. ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ Daisy says. She is married to Tom Buchanan, who is wealthy and powerful and comes from an upper class family. Despite his fashionable clothes Gatsby is the son of a poor farmer, from the unfashionable Middle West. His real name is James Gatz and he grew up in the heart of America, but ended up in New York, where the money is.

The American dream is to rise from rags to riches but to do so Gatsby and his friends such as Meyer Wolfshiem, the gangster, get involved with gambling and crime. Wolfshiem fixed the outcome of the World’s Series baseball tournament. This shows how the American dream of fairness has been corrupted, even in sport where you would expect a level playing field. At the time, after the First World War, when the novel is set alcohol was banned in America. It is said that Gatsby’s money comes from bootlegging, which is the illegal supply of alcoholic drinks. There is a lot of drinking in the novel, especially at Gatsby’s garden parties, so in this way the American ideal has failed. ‘In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.’ But almost no-one turned up at his funeral.

In ‘Huckleberry Finn’, by Mark Twain, Huck’s father is a drunkard, which shows that Prohibition might have been needed, even in the nineteenth century. But people still drink heavily in the Jazz Age and that shows how their dreams have failed and how they feel unfulfilled in their lives. By being a bootlegger, Gatsby is an example of the failed American dream, even though he is rich and has a big house and expensive cars and clothes.

Racism is an issue in ‘The Great Gatsby’ that shows how America has failed to live up to the dream of equality. Tom and Daisy are prejudiced. Daisy says, ‘We’ve got to beat them down’. Gatsby seems more tolerant, although he does not help people suffering from injustice in the way that Huck Finn does when he assists Jim, the escaped slave. Gatsby lives in the lap of luxury while the Wilsons have to live in the valley of ashes, where rubbish from the city is dumped, working hard to just to survive. George Wilson eventually kills Gatsby, blaming him for Myrtle’s death. This is incorrect and shows the injustice that lies beneath the glamour of the American dream.

Nick Carraway, who is Gatsby’s neighbour and Daisy’s cousin, has an affair with Jordan Baker who is a golfer. There has been a scandal over her cheating, which is another example of the dream of fairness being corrupted by greed. Gatsby often calls people ‘old sport’, which is meant to show how sophisticated he is. ‘Just standing here, old sport,’ he says to Nick. But as sport in the novel is seen to be far from fair, and so doesn’t live up to the ideal, this is another indication that Jay Gatsby is a representative of the failed American dream.