The American dream in the great Gatsby novel

The American Dream in The Great Gatsby and Fight Club

The American dream is a recurring subject in The Great Gatsby, which is due to the narrator’s consistent presentation of this theme. The underlying cause of everything that occurs in the books is the same as the underlying cause of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 cult classic, Fight Club: an idea, an idea that everyone aspires and dreams for. As different cultures embrace various views in the pursuit of realizing the American ideal, the Fight Club ethic is firmly rooted in the guerrilla type of resistance. Evidently, these two novels have risen to the top of the list of fiction works that have been discussed, critiqued, and referenced the most throughout the history of American literature. Readers familiar with both books can agree that they are the kind of texts which in some way they will always be retold and updated. The novels are depicted similar with amazingly undisguised parallels in structure, style, the tone and even the character dynamics.it is also notable that Palahniuk’s comments encourage the reader to read the books together. By understanding both texts together, there much more about their relationship that is likely to be discovered than just the formal similarities. The American dream, development of commodity culture in America and its devastating impact on individuals, is brought into focus by both books (Fitzgerald, March 27, 2016 at 11:54). Without any doubt, they are a fantastic representation of age in American history when everything was possible, or at least people thought it was.

Insight into Souls and Themes in The Great Gatsby

In the Great Gatsby novel, Fitzgerald doesn’t merely describe the social, historical and economic conditions as factors driving his character, but the provision of insight into the souls of the characters. The way such motives justifies the behavior and actions that are being explored here. In the same context, the dream suffers a decline as a result of the immoral actions of the characters, but its foundation is the same as it was when the first settlers explored the new Promised Land. Although there are several themes which arise from the novel, we cannot help ourselves wondering how much of this dream is a reality as well as the amount of illusion we might be having as well. The actual nature of the American dream and the various techniques pursued by people as they try to achieve it, as well as the moral implications their actions bring, are some of the major themes discussed in the great Gatsby.

A Study of American Commodity Culture

It is worth noting that each of this book offers a unique snapshot of the American society of its time. Since Fitzgerald and Palahniuk’s are fascinated by the way, social and economic conditions affect the lives of the characters, reading both books present a study of the ascendancy of American commodity culture and its cultural, social and personal ramifications. In the twentieth century, there America was dealing with the challenges of capitalism with regards to dynamics surrounding the commodity culture. Both the Great Gatsby and the Fight Club give an insight on the various ways of the culmination of the consumer mentality during this era.

Connections Between Characters and Themes

In the Great Gatsby, commodities are ubiquitous extraordinary gestures. They are used to define and bolster his identity the identity of the narrator. In addition to these; the narrator presents a world in which young intellectuals secure their sense of self, social integrity through condos in certain parts of town, particular motor vehicles, and specific type of furniture. The narrator of Fight Club strongly suspects of something awry in the whole scenario. Although lulled into complacency by his classy life and his fondness for the things around him, he begins to feel that something vaguely sinister and unhealthy in the contemporary culture. By comparing these two contexts as narrated in both novels, we can quickly conclude that the world of a Fight Club is a logical extension of the culture of commodification at the center of the great Gatsby (O’Rourke, (1982)).

Formal Similarities and Differences

Having discussed how the theme of the two novels the Fight Club and great Gatsby is standard, it is essential to address the formal similarities between the two books. These include characterization, the genre, and narrative structure. This observation will be used to do a critical analysis of the similarities and differences between the two novels.

The Danger in the American Dream

Fight Club works in advance to find the danger in the transformative power of the American dream itself as it is predicated on what Jimmy Gatz refers to as the unreality of reality. In the Gatsby, this is not explicit, but it leads Fitzgerald to his notoriously ambivalent attitude toward the American dream. The startling differences arise between the two as Fight Club is a dirty, rough world where else the great Gatsby is portrayed as the incandescent, polished world.

Narrative Structure and Character Dynamics

In the same texts, however, these differences are overshadowed by having similar formal elements which include the narrative structure and character dynamics. The unlikely hero is Jay Gatsby as Nick Caraway, the likable but gaudy parvenu with mysterious antecedents. The nameless narrator of Fight Club, the hero, is Tyler burden, a charismatic loner who works odd jobs as a movie projectionist and banquet waiter. Here we find that Gatsby is wealthy man leaving in an expensive mansion while Tyler seems to be an impoverished squatter in a decrepit house which is deemed to be a chemical waste. In spite of these conditions, there are notable similarities between Gatsby and Tyler; both men engulf the imagination and respect to their friends, which in turn occasions the retrospective narratives of the novels. The advantage of reading Gatsby alongside Fight Club is that the latter points to the significance of the motive of masculinity for the characters in both novels. Both narrator experience a split of identity-based on their skills with the logic of commodity culture. The emasculation and physiological crisis are presented when nick caraway mentions he is a recently returned soldier from the Great War. His lousy condition is from the wartime experience. In his thirties, nick is uncertain, and his plans are vague lacking the independent sense of self or purpose. In the course of the novel nick is involved in the relationship, but in each of them, he feels disconnected.

On the other hand, the narrator of Fight Club is the thirty-year-old business professional who feels alienated just like nick. The disconnection here is also as a result of trauma. He spends much of his time running equations in which he weighs human lives against the cost of out of court settlements.

According to these texts, both nick and the narrator of the Fight Club, they are alienated from their modern, busy, urban societies, what is more, surprising is that both seem detached from themselves and their desires to an almost pathological degree presented regarding compromised masculinity. Typically, despite these critical differences in their lives and passions, Gatsby and Tyler are both flamboyant, attractive, charismatic personalities.

Conclusion

From these perspectives, it has come to my logical conclusion that their many remarkable similarities between these two novels .the Fight Club offers a fuller understanding of one of the most hotly debated issues in the great Gatsby as for the American dream. There is an insightful relationship between the American dream and commodity culture across the twentieth century. Critics claim that the American dream is something that in some way went wrong. According to Fight Club, the American dream went wrong. Both novels acknowledge that the there is a probability that the problem was with the dream itself. The American dream is not an end but the process of steady transformation, rebirth, and re-alignment of the initial visions.

References

Fitzgerald, F. S. (March 27, 2016 at 11:54). The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

O’Rourke, D. ( (1982)). Nick Carraway as Narrator in The Great Gatsby. International Fiction Review, 9(1).