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The Great Gatsby Part 16: American Dreamin 43459 Views
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Description:
One could follow Gatsby’s example of reinventing oneself, but we hear there are weird side effects. Seriously, Carol from HR still hasn’t stopped calling us “old sport.” It’s getting really old… Don’t you dare say “sport,” Carol...
Transcript
- 00:01
We speak student!
- 00:05
The Great Gatsby
- 00:07
American Dreamin'
- 00:09
a la Shmoop
- 00:13
This world
Full Transcript
- 00:14
is some reflection of the American Dream.
- 00:16
Or at least one person's view
- 00:18
of the American Dream.
- 00:20
So explain kind of
- 00:22
what the take is on the American Dream here,
- 00:25
because it's a failed thing before you even get out of the gate.
- 00:28
Because you're not aiming at the direction you wanna go in life, anyway.
- 00:32
[ manic giggle ]
- 00:34
[ splat ]
- 00:35
Right, and the end of the book really reminds us of that,
- 00:37
because at Gatsby's funeral,
- 00:40
where -- Three people show up to Gatsby's funeral:
- 00:43
Nick, obviously, the owl-eyed man, the guy who found his books
- 00:47
in the library, and Gatsby's father.
- 00:49
And Gatsby's dad brings a journal
- 00:54
that Gatsby had kept and shows it
- 00:56
to Nick. And it basically has
- 00:58
this schedule written out on it.
- 01:00
Wake up at this time, do this, do this.
- 01:02
And then at the bottom it says,
- 01:03
"Stop X, Y, and Z." Basically telling himself
- 01:06
how he can recreate himself.
- 01:08
And we get to see young Gatsby's words,
- 01:11
or young Gatz' words saying,
- 01:13
"You're not gonna be who you are anymore.
- 01:14
You're gonna change yourself."
- 01:15
So we see that since he was young,
- 01:17
he's been completely trying to reinvent himself.
- 01:20
But he ends up dead.
- 01:22
We find this out while we're at his funeral.
- 01:25
So there's no way that Gatsby woke up and was like,
- 01:29
"You know what? I wanna be
- 01:31
rich and successful. That's my personal dream."
- 01:34
That was not his personal dream.
- 01:35
That was America's dream. That was the American Dream,
- 01:38
to start from nothing and become rich and successful.
- 01:41
And he does it. Again, he gets there,
- 01:46
and, even though he has fulfilled someone else's American Dream,
- 01:49
he has not fulfilled his own.
- 01:53
And we think maybe if he'd gotten Daisy,
- 01:56
would he have fulfilled that dream?
- 01:57
But we think probably not.
- 01:59
And it continues like that.
- 02:00
Fitzgerald and his generation really were --
- 02:03
It was a generation of disillusionment,
- 02:06
meaning they really just were not psyched about what was going on in the world.
- 02:13
And it reads for me as this
- 02:15
ultimate underlying tragedy in that the guy worked so hard,
- 02:19
so disciplined at all the values you'd attribute
- 02:23
to a normal American Dream success,
- 02:26
to fulfill a dream that wasn't really him.
- 02:29
It wasn't necessarily his.
- 02:31
At least inertly.
- 02:33
And he ended up dying trying,
- 02:35
so not a Disney animated musical coming soon your way.
- 02:39
All right, so that's Gatsby a la Shmoop on video with Dr. Deb.
- 02:43
[ music ]
- 02:52
[ whoop ]
- 02:53
How does Fitzgerald portray the American Dream in The Great Gatsby?
- 03:00
[ wolf whistle ]
- 03:02
It wasn't necessarily his.
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