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The failure of the 'American Dream Bumm

Thesis (M. A.) from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Stuttgart, 29 entries in the bibliography, language: English, comment: The main focus in my M. A. thesis is on "Tender Is The Night", "The Great Gatsby" and "This Side Of Paradise" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. My goal is to point out in how far Fitzgerald depicts various aspects of the American Dream and its failure and decline in the above mentioned novels. , abstract: 1. Introduction [...] 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. [...] 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 construct