The Great Gatsby :: English Literature

The Great Gatsby The capacity to dream is a natural characteristic possessed by all mankind. Americans living in a country based on the philosophy of pursuing great American dreams go about pursuing their own goals in many ways. Ironically the American dream itself is the ultimate illusion that can never satisfy those who pursue it. The American dream was only possible when it was a potential. Nick in Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby, realized this as he imagines a past when the Dutch first laid their eyes on the vast wilderness of the uninhabited United States. Gatsby’s ideals in this novel are the ideals of all Americans. Gatsby and Americans search for a dream and yet nobody truly understands what it is they are really in search of. People go about fulfilling these dreams by using cheap reality and in the end it does not measure up to the size of the dream itself; the dreamer is bound to be disappointed with every accomplishment of the dream. At the conclusion of Fitzgerald’s book, The Great Gatsby, the main character Gatsby has recently died and Nick stands facing the front door of Gatsby’s mansion. From this moment, Nick looks at Gatsby’s house for a last time. He sees a swear word on the wall, and like Holden in the book, The Catcher in the Rye, he too crosses the word out; trying to preserve the innocence. Nick wants to keep Gatsby’s dream pure even though it is already lost. Later on while Nick is all alone, everything begins to melt away. He starts to picture how it looked a hundred years ago when the Dutch sailors first reached a new world. Nick’s world becomes the world of idealism, where the physical world doesn’t matter; the great house of Gatsby begins to melt away and finally disappear in Nick’s mind for that moment. Nick sees that, â€Å"†¦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,† (pg 189). For that one time the Dutch merchants saw the idea of property in a different way. The Dutch saw the wilderness and trees not as wood- cutters or property owners but as poets, like presented in Emerson’s, â€Å"Nature.† Wood- cutters own the timber physically, but, â€Å"there is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet,†(Nature). The Dutch saw the beauty of the land and trees and