Illusion & Disillusion

One of the themes often present in Fitzgerald's work is a sense of living in illusion or becoming disillusioned. Pleasure was the goal of the Jazz Age, pursuing fame, wealth, and love through selfish means. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes of characters who are often under an illusion about the reality of what they are pursuing and the effects of their subsequent disillusionment.

Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned desires to live "the good life". Anthony and his wife live lavishly, with the expectation of an inheritance from his grandfather. In the course of the novel, Anthony is disinherited, and they realize their potential to make something of themselves is dwindling. In Tender is the Night, Dick Diver seeks happiness in spite of his troubled marriage. He pursues an affair, but even the love of another women cannot bring him happiness, and Dick descends into alcoholism. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby wants to turn back time, to be the only man Daisy loves. "'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!'" But Gatsby finds what he never saw before; that there was no reality behind his vision. When confronted with reality, what Fitzgerald's characters believe about themselves becomes an illusion.

The American Dream and Pursuit of Happiness

World War I - the war to end all wars - had ended, taking with it a large part of a generation. The massive destruction of the War helped to fuel the Modernist movement - a movement that viewed everything as essentially meaningless. So now, after all this, was the American Dream worthwhile or even possible? Was happiness possible, or was it always to be the "pursuit of happiness"? F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in This Side of Paradise, "Here was a new generation, a new generation dedicated more than the last one to the fear of poverty and the worship of success, grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths to man shaken." Fitzgerald's writings explore the themes of wealth and social status and their roles in the pursuit of happiness.

In The Great Gatsby, the characters pursue the American Dream with fervor. The Buchanans, Tom and Daisy, seem to hold riches as the epitome of success. Daisy refused Gatsby's offer of marriage for Tom's, for the first was poor and the other prosperous. Tom and Daisy are driven by money. "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or what ever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made." They even went so far as murder to achieve their ends. Gatsby seeks success and happiness elsewhere - in Daisy. He spends his life gaining wealth - sometimes legally and sometimes otherwise - in order to gain her love, only to be rejected by her once more. Both the Buchanans and Gatsby were willing to pay any price for the American Dream, but neither were successful. He wrote of the American Dream gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Through his writings on the American Dream, Fitzgerald showed the emptiness behind wealth and success. He would later write "that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not `happiness and pleasure' but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle." It was not just fortune Fitzgerald was writing on, but the essence of a country.