“The American Dream has become a death sentence of...

â€Å"The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. Its unequivocally absurd.† –Zoltan Istvan. In both This Side of Paradise and This Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald comments on the corruption of the American Dream. Throughout the beautiful text and prose of his first and second novels, respectively, Fitzgerald mocks the ghastly nightmare the American ‘Dream’ has become. The former follows the story of the downfall of a wealthy, promising young man struggling to gain romantic success, who enlists in the army along the way, to a poverty-stricken alcoholic struggling to now gain romantic and†¦show more content†¦The whole idea of rags to riches embodied the work ethic of the 1920s and previous decades as the idyllic Golden Age of flappers and mobsters thrived. However, the ideology was flawed in itself that people were striving for money and not happiness. The average American assumed that happiness was money and were therefore obsessed with the culture of the attaining money. While this was also mostly a time of attempted moral reinvigoration in the older generations, baring the Prohibition and all, many would do whatever they could to get what they wanted, which in most cases was money to buy ‘nice’ things. Everyone’s goal was to become extravagantly wealthy or to die trying. The saddest part of it all is many went to the grave unable to fulfill their actually quite impossible dream. Fitzgerald presents these stories in the format of citizens who are already wealthy and actually living the American Dream so as to make it more glamorous than having seen the grueling work done by some close relative. This almost further empowers the culture of materialism as it sets the scene, only to deplore it as the books go on. These people start out pampered and are presumed to become even more wealthy and powerful but spiral downward as they fail to find happiness in their lavish lifestyles. In This Side of Paradise, this is exactly the case. In one aspect, Amory Blaine is alreadyShow MoreRelatedUgly Truth Of The American Dream In The Great Gatsby Essay863 Words   |  4 PagesTruth of the American Dream in The Great Gatsby â€Å"The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. Its unequivocally absurd.† -Zoltan Istvan. The American dream was an ideal held by many hopeful and ignorant people who tried to see the best in the world. But like everything else, a lie doesn’t last forever. Hope eventually dies and the world becomes colder. In