The American Dream means different things to The Great Gatsby’s characters.
The American Dream is the belief that anyone, regardless of social class or group, can attain success and happiness through hard work and determination.
For Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, it means power. For Myrtle Wilson, Daisy, and Jordan Baker, it means luxury. For George Wilson, it means control.
The greed of the other characters corrupts Nick’s view of the American Dream.
The Great Gatsby Quotes With Page Numbers
The Great Gatsby Quotes About The American Dream
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway’s father), Chapter 1, Page 7
The American Dream is that anyone in America can become successful because of its advantages. But in reality, not everyone in the USA has the same connections, resources, or knowledge to succeed. This quote from Nick Carraway’s father recognizes the disparity between the haves and have-nots.
“Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway), Chapter 1, Pages 7, 8
Nick’s quote recognizes the dark side of the American Dream. Greed drove Gatsby to gain wealth and power through illegal and immoral means.
“The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway), Chapter 1, Page 8
“I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. […] Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway), Chapter 1, Page 9
“Why they came East I don’t know. . . . I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 10
“Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 11
“…he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 18
“This is a 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. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 2, Page 19
“But (Doctor Eckleburg’s) eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under the sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 2, Page 19
“On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 28
“I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 29
“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 33
“He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American – that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 41
“He looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it or choked on it as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt his whole statement fell to pieces and I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about him after all.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 42
“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I thought; “anything at all… .
”Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 44
“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 44
“Meyer Wolfsheim? No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”
“Fixed the World’s Series?” I repeated.
The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely HAPPENED, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people — with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.
“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute.
“He just saw the opportunity.”
“Why isn’t he in jail?”
“They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, Chapter 4, Page 47
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 50
“Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 56
“I keep [the house] always full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things. Celebrated people.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby, Chapter 5, Page 57
“We went upstairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms with sunken baths—intruding into one chamber where a dishevelled man in pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 58
“It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such–such beautiful shirts before.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Daisy Buchanan), Chapter 5, Page 58
“‘If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,’ said Gatsby. ‘You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.’”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby, Chapter 5, Page 59
“Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Characters: Nick about Daisy), Chapter 5, Page 60
“The rich get richer and the poor get – children.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Characters: Nick and Daisy), Chapter 5, Page 60
“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 60
“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator about Jay Gatsby), Chapter 5, Page 60
“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 6, Page 62
“He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 6, Page 69
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Jordan Baker), Chapter 7, Page 74
“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of ——”
I hesitated.
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money — that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it… . high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl… .
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Nick Caraway and Jay Gatsby, Chapter 7, Page 75
“Oh, you want too much!”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Daisy Buchanan), Chapter 7, Page 82
“With every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Nick Caraway as the narrator, Chapter 7, Page 84
“Thirty–the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Nick Caraway as the narrator, Chapter 7, Page 84
“No phone message arrived…I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn‘t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky…A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Nick Caraway as the narrator, Chapter 8, Page 99
“A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Nick Caraway as the narrator, Chapter 8, Page 99
“Did you start him in business?” I inquired.
“Start him! I made him.”
“Oh.”
“I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right away he was a fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man, and when he told me he was at Oggsford I knew I could use him good. I got him to join up in the American Legion and he used to stand high there. Right off he did some work for a client of mine up to Albany. We were so thick like that in everything.”— he held up two bulbous fingers ——” always together.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Characters: Nick Carraway and Meyer Wolfsheim), Chapter 9, Page 104
“That’s my Middle West . . . the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark. . . . I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 107
“We drew in deep breaths . . . as we walked back . . . through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 107
“a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 110
“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 110
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 110
The Great Gatsby Quotes About The Green Light With Page Numbers
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 110
How does The Great Gatsby show the American Dream?
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays the American Dream as a concept of materialism and excess.
The characters in the novel are obsessed with wealth, luxury, and status, believing that these things will bring them happiness and fulfillment.
However, pursuing the American Dream ultimately leads to destruction and disappointment for the characters. Fitzgerald illustrates that money cannot buy love or true happiness and that the American Dream is an unattainable goal, even for society’s richest and most privileged members.
The novel highlights the flaws and limitations of the American Dream, showing that it is a fallible concept that ultimately leads to the downfall of those who pursue it.
Where in The Great Gatsby does it talk about the American Dream?
The American Dream is prevalent throughout the novel, particularly in Chapters 6, 7, and 8. The theme of the American Dream is a central focus of The Great Gatsby.
The novel explores the concept of the American Dream through the characters’ pursuit of wealth, status, and happiness.
How does The Great Gatsby criticize the American Dream?
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald criticizes the idea of the American Dream as a meritocracy where anyone can rise to the top with enough hard work.
Through the character of Jay Gatsby, who overcomes his poor past to gain wealth and social status in 1920s NYC, only to be ultimately rejected by the “old money” crowd and killed,
Fitzgerald highlights the destructive nature of the American Dream. The novel suggests that pursuing the American Dream can lead to tragedy and moral decay.