In his essay Gatsby’s Pristine Dream: The Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in the Tribal Twenties, Jeffery Louis Decker covers many topics relating to The Great Gatsby including his thoughts on whether or not Gatsby is the story of an American dream. Decker argues the “phrase [the American dream] is a misnomer” when it comes to describing the book (67). Instead he believes that the book is just a story told through a nationalist vision. Decker’s main disagreement on the validity of using the American dream as an analytical category for The Great Gatsby is that the book does not “belong to the American dream of the Great Depression” which was the time when the book was written and set (68). Decker also believes that The Great Gatsby is not a story of the American dream because “the social climate of the early 1920s, specifically as it is expressed in increasingly racialized forms of nativism, creates the conditions under which Fitzgerald’s narrator imagines Gatsby as a figure for America.” (56). 

 

While Decker argues that Gatsby is not a text about the American dream, I believe that it is.He believes that “the ‘American dream’ is not a trans-historical concept but, [...] a term invented after the Twenties in an effort to address the crisis of the Great Depression” (56). I disagree with this claim because even though the term might not have been officially coined yet, the idea of the American dream could still be prominent. Additionally, the term may not have been used at the time to describe Gatsby because it hadn’t been coined, yet that doesn’t mean one can’t use the term today if they believed it an accurate description of the text. I believe that Gatsby is a story of Jay Gatsby’s American dream, though perhaps a failed dream. Gatsby’s American dream is a rather materialistic one as he dreams of wealth in order to win Daisy Buchanan’s love. Although, in the end, Gatsby was able to acquire great wealth though he never acquired Daisy’s love.