The failure of the 'American Dream' in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Magisterarbeit

zur Erlangung des Grades eines Magister Artium der
philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Stuttgart

The Failure Of The American Dream
In The Works Of F. Scott Fitzgerald

by:

Tobias Bumm

Institut für Literaturwissenschaft Amerikanistik
Stuttgart, im Dezember 2004

Table of Contents

1. Introduction Page ... 04

2. The American Dream and its origin Page  ... 06

3. Short biography of Francis Key Scott Fitzgerald Page  ... 09

4. Short definition of Modernism in American literature Page ...  11

5. The Great Gatsby Page  ... 12

6. This Side Of Paradise
6.1. Introduction Page ... 22
6.2. The most important characters in ‘This Side Of Paradise’ Page ... 26
6.3. Version of the American Dream in ‘This Side Of Paradise’ Page ... 31
6.4. Rosalind and Eleonor - The collapse of the American Dream Page ... 37

7. Tender Is The Night
7.1. Introduction Page ... 45
7.2. Dick Diver’s way into alienation and decay Page ... 47
7.3. The love affair with Rosemary Hoyt Page ... 54
7.4. The way back home to the U.S.A. after the decay Page ... 58

8. Thesis Summary Page  ... 63

9. Bibliography Page  ... 68

1. Introduction

Even though F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life did not last very long, he wrote some of the most important works of American literature in the first half of the 20th century. He was born in the Midwest, in St. Paul, Minnesota, but moved to the East Coast very soon to go to university there. Being a midwesterner made it quite hard for him to get used to the mentality of the gentry at the East Coast that mainly had their origins in England.

After his experience in WW1, that did not see him as a soldier fighting in Europe but as a member of the army stationed at home, his life changed. Seeing many of his fellow students return from the war and realizing that what they saw during the warfare was something very much emotionally disturbing, he tried to cover up human feelings with festivities, drinking parties and sexual extravagance. He gradually got more and more fascinated by the decadent life people were leading around 1925, the so-called Jazz Age. Fitzgerald as an upcoming writer and his wife Zelda soon started living their version of the American Dream starting in an era of prosperity at the beginning of the 1920s, going through a period of economic decline at the end of the decade, ending in the time at the beginning of WW2 which, again, was very hard for the American society, since they got more and more aware of the fact that the life they had been leading was only make-belief and that American responsibilities in the world were very different to what people had considered them until then. Fitzgerald as a person in society and as a writer underwent all this change. His version of the American Dream changed from a very positive one to quite a bad one. In order to take a look at this change, I will deal with three of his major novels in my thesis. At first, I will examine his most well-known novel ‘The Great Gatsby’. Since there have already been written a lot of papers, books and secondary literature about it, I will not do it as deeply as one could.
I rather want to take it up here again, since it is the melting pot of all of Fitzgerald’s work as an author. After that I will proceed with his first successful novel ‘This Side Of Paradise’, a piece of work that made him an instant success in the U.S.A. in the 1920s and that got him a lot of critical acclaim all over the nation.

This early novel portrays the life and college years of Amory Blain, a young man who comes to his college with a lot of ambition, his version of the American Dream, which gradually fades away. The third novel I will be dealing with is ‘Tender Is The Night’. This very late novel in Fitzgerald’s life shows the life of Dick Diver, a psychiatrist abroad. It portrays his life as a young man with all the goals he has and finally his way of dealing with his wife’s schizophrenia and the development that leads him into disillusionment.

What these three novels have in common is that on their outset, the protagonists seem to have a great future ahead of them or at least think they do. It is not before a certain point of the books that the readers realize that the characters’ version and vision of the American Dream or of their lives and what they think it should be like, has to fail in the end. How do they want to achieve wealth and a better status in society has to be explored and explained. Another point will be, how their strife is conducted and why it finally has to fail and why they cannot succeed in what they do and what kinds of obstacles society puts in their way.

I will take a close look at the protagonists’ zeals and at their struggle to achieve what they want and at their failure to do so. The examination will mostly take place from a literary standpoint. Since this is a thesis in American literature, I will focus on how the respective piece of literature is made and not so much on the historical context. The latter one will only be used to make certain passages of the respective novel clear and lucid. The main spot is focussed on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s construction of the American Dream and its final failure in his works. In order to make my points clear, I will mostly use the method of Deconstruction, i.e., I will stay very closely to the respective text and interpret it. This method is very suitable for me to state my case on certain parts of the text to make clear in what way the protagonists’ strife for their version of the American Dream fails. It furthermore allows me to show the connections between the meaning of the novels and the way they were constructed by the author. This link is very important for Fitzgerald’s works since he used a lot of symbols in his novels to make them more interesting and to breathe life into them, in order to attract the readers’ attention.

2. The American Dream and its origin

The first thing you have to do in order to get an idea about what F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works are about and the main topics he kept taking up over and over, is to take a look at the fundament that the U.S.A. are built on. This is mainly the dream of wealth and prosperity dreamed by millions of people who came to the newlyfounded country after 1776 to settle there in order to leave their poor homes in Europe, Asia and sometimes even other parts of the world behind. The Puritans’ dream was the ‘City upon a hill’. They wanted America to be a pure country in which they could accomplish their moral goals and where they could become a religious community that is able to live their faith as freely as possible, without any kind of persecution.

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