Disillusion Of American Dream

The American Dream is a peculiar phenomenon of the American land. As old as the American history, the American Dream is the aftermath of pursuit of the ultimate freedom in the empirical world plus the specific conditions in American land. By the transcendental superiority demoted into empirical superiority and the transcendental inferiority absent, the American Dream is degenerating into a nightmare, the process of which is reflected in the history of the American literature. F. Scott Fitzgerald's works typically depicts the disillusion of the American Dream semi-biographically around the theme of wealth, beauty and youth. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, depicts the disillusion of Amory Blaine, for he revolts against the old morality in order to find himself. The disillusion of Antony Patch loses himself and degenerates spiritually in The Beautiful and Damned. Gatsby is disillusioned in the process to find his symbolized eternal love by the pursuit of the American Dream in The Great Gatsby. Dick Diver desires to combine his career and love together and become a member of the upper class through the marriage with Nicole yet with himself lost in the end. In The Last Tycoon Monroe Stahr destroys his body and soul to sustain his principle by which he could maintain his property.As a talented writer who exemplarily chronicled the Jazz Age in detail, F. Scott Fitzgerald's works influenced the culture of that time. Especially, his first novel, This Side of Paradise became a guidebook for youth to enter the world and understand the life after its first print. In appearance, the American Dream depicted in Fitzgerald's works always ends with disillusion. But like what it shows in how the American Dream becomes in future, the spirit that nourished the American Dream is absent but not dead as the hope that Fitzgerald put on the spirit of the struggle for realization of the American Dream.