The Promise and Failure of the American Dream in Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction
Keywords:
American Dream, corruption, success and failure, illusion and disillusion, Jazz Age, ideology, criticism, American identity.
Abstract
The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s best fictional account of the promise and failure of the American dream because here the congruity of story and style and attitude is most meaningful to the depiction of this theme. Fitzgerald created Gatsby and his myth to be an emblem of the irony and the corruption of the American dream. Fitzgerald was the embodiment of the fluid polarities of American experience: success and failure, illusion and disillusion, dream and nightmare. The exhaustion of the frontier and the rebound of the post war expatriate movement marked for Fitzgerald as the end of a long period in human history, the history of the Post-Renaissance man in America, that he made the substance of his works. Fitzgerald’s ideology, a serious criticism on the American Dream, reveals the real nature of American life so that he could find a way to the truth of the American identity.Downloads
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References
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Burnam, T. (1952). The eyes of Dr. Eckleburg: A re-examination of the great gatsby. College English, 14, 7-12. [CrossRef]
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1945). The crack-up (E. Wilson, Ed.). New York: New Directions.
_______. (1922). Beautiful and damned. New York: Scribner's
_______. (1925). The great Gatsby. New York: Scribner's.
_______. (1964). The letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (A. Turnbull, Ed.). New York: Scribner's.
_______. (1978). The notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (M. J. Bruccoli, Ed.). New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
_______. (1934). Tender is the night. New York: Scribner's.
James, P. (2005). History and masculinity in F. Scott Fitzgerald's This side of paradise. Modern Fiction Studies, 51, 1-33. [CrossRef]
Mizener, A. (Ed.). (1963). F. Scott Fitzgerald: A collection of critical essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Trilling, L. (1950). The liberal imagination. New York: Viking Press.
Will, B. (2005). The great Gatsby and the obscene word. College Literature, 32, 125-146. [CrossRef]
Published
2010-02-17
How to Cite
Ghasemi, P., & Tiur, M. (2010). The Promise and Failure of the American Dream in Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction. K@ta, 11(2), 117-127. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.9744/kata.11.2.117-127
Section
Articles
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License
