Nick concludes that there must be moments during Daisy’s interaction with Gatsby when she falls short of the dream of her that Gatsby’s created, the “colossal vitality of his illusion.” If Daisy is Gatsby’s dream, in a novel about the American Dream, what do her shortcomings say about how that Dream can be unfulfilling?
The Great Gatsby – 6
The Great Gatsby – 7
Fitzgerald describes the “vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty” James Gatz re-creates himself for when assumes the name Jay Gatsby. This concise description is a bleak summary of the American Dream.
The Great Gatsby – 10
Nick notes that Gatsby’s guests guessed at his “corruption” while he waved at them, “concealing his incorruptible dream,” his intensely personal version of the American Dream, his yearning for Daisy.
The Great Gatsby – 11
Nick describes Gatsby as having “paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.” This sounds a lot like the “grotesques” from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, men and women who are disfigured by their fixation on things they aren’t able to obtain or accomplish. Fitzgerald uses the word “grotesque” in the same paragraph.
Of Mice and Men – 7
After his elderly dog is killed, an old man named Candy says “When they can me here I wisht somebody’d shoot me.” This lament accompanies Candy’s request that Lennie and George take him along to the ranch that they imagine they’ll own one day. He buys in to their dream that they’ll find something more than the mundane routine that typifies their lives.
Of Mice and Men – 9
Crooks, a black character, disparages Lennie and George’s dream of owning land and compares their dream to ideas about heaven. He says, “I seen hunderds [sic] of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads…Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land.” If Crooks’s disillusionment can be associated with modernism, does his perspective support Toni Morrison’s idea that “Black people were the first modernists,” the first to be disillusioned as a result of their experience in America?
Invisible Man: 1
In the prologue of the novel, the main character writes “I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones.” This reference to sleeping people brings to mind the people Ta-nehisi Coates refers to as “the Dreamers” in Between the World and Me.