Gatsby American Dream Quotes

Gatsby is a critique of the American Dream. The only people who end up rich or successful in the novel are the ones who start out that way. Almost everyone else ends up dead or destitute. And it’s a critique of the kind of vapid capitalism that can’t find anything more interesting to do with money than try to make more of it. The book lays bare the carelessness of the entitled rich—the kind of people who buy puppies but won’t take care of dogs, or who purchase vast libraries of books but never read any of them.

Fitzgerald’s plot may suggest that the American Dream is a mirage, but his words make that dream irresistible.

For Americans, the car is the American way. Jay Gatsby roars through capitalism, individual freedom, and the good life. For China, the train is the metaphor. Everyone's on board, there's no chance to steer, and it's clickety-clack to collectivism's dreams.

That year, a middle-aged acquaintance asked me what my favorite book was and I said "On the Road." He smiled, said, "That was my favorite book at sixteen." At the time , I thought he was patronizing me, that it was going to be my favorite book forever and ever, amen. But he was right. As an adult, I'm more of a Gatsby girl-more tragic, more sad, just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer.

Assim vamos remando, barcos a navegar contra a correnteza, incessantemente levados de volta ao passado

Gatsby's fall from grace may be grim, but the language of the novel is buoyant; Fitzgerald's plot may suggest that the American Dream is a mirage, but his words make that dream irresistible.

Every nation can be summed up by a single book or play, or by a particular author. America is perhaps perfectly encapsulated by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby is a book about luxury, enchantment, glamour, magic spells, aspiration, a vulgar Wonderland, insecurity, pretentiousness, bluffing, soullessness, fakes, phonies, emptiness, desperation, regrets, and impossible dreams. “Her voice is full of money,” says the narrator about the beguiling muse Daisy Buchanan. Could this not serve as the epitaph for the American Dream itself as it is finally laid to rest?

What makes Chinatown so uniquely disturbing as an American metaphor is that it is so unlike the whiteness of Ahab’s whale or the greenness of Gatsby’s light. However illusory, these are totems of aspiration, of possibility. Futility and fate, by contrast, are concepts that defy the capitalist’s dream of agency and advancement, the (graying) Protestant work ethic that assured pre-Watergate Americans that life was linear, not cyclical, and the game wasn’t rigged against them. It is no wonder, then, that Towne’s metaphor should borrow its desolation from Polanski, a European. “The American has not yet assimilated psychologically the disappearance of his own geographical frontier,” wrote the philosopher William Barrett in 1962. “His spiritual horizon is still the limitless play of human possibilities, and as yet he has not lived through the crucial experience of human finitude.” A decade after this writing, that spiritual horizon reached its finitude in Vietnam and Watergate, and symbolically in Los Angeles, the geographic end of America. As Towne foresaw, the only place left to go was up—up to The Sting, to “Happy Days,” Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, to “a mix of nostalgia and parody,” Kael wrote, the mass denial of the terrible truths Gittes was powerless to undo.

Gatsby, her yıl önümüzde biraz daha gerileyen o yeşil ışığa, o bel-getirici geleceğe inanıyordu. Kaçırdık o vakit elimizden onu, ama ziyanı yok, yarın daha hızlı koşacak, kollarımızı daha ilerilere uzatacağız... Ve bir sabah, aydınlıklar içinde... O ümitledir ki şimdi sefer etmekteyiz, biz o akıntıya karşı giden tekneler, durmadan geriye, geçmişe çarpılıp atılsak da ne gam...

Assim vamos remando, barcos a navegar contra a correnteza, incessantemente levados de volta ao passado.