The Great American Hero

Gatsby is pretty much the American hero. There, I said it. Now bear with me please while I try to explain myself splatter paint style, i.e. throw out a bunch of crap and hope it sticks. Gatsby is a firm believer in the American Dream, and, from Nick's early perspective, appears to be the ultimate American success story. He was a rags to riches guy who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. However, by the beginning of the story Gatsby already has his success, so there is no dramatic action in the story for him to gain his success. This means that he cannot be a hero of the American dream because he supposedly already accomplished all of the components of the dream. The beginning of The Great Gatsby could have easily been the end of a typical dimestore novel of the era. But it's not. It's just the beginning. Gatsby actually turns out to be a tragic hero. At the end of the novel he is lying dead in his swimming pool, a symbol of his success. It is a tragedy. Gatsby is a great man, whose unyielding drive has seemingly allowed him to conquer the world. However, Gatsby has one flaw. He cannot let go of the past, and, not only that, he never gives up his belief that he can get back to his past and make his world perfect. This inability to let go and accept that there are things in the world beyond human control is what eventually destroys him. My thesis, and yes I have a thesis, is that Gatsby is the Great American Hero not because he is the embodiment of the American Dream, but rather because he is destruction of it. America is, and always has been, a Christian nation. We were founded with a Puritan mentality, and even though religion has been overtaken by secularism in the recent years, we have never given up our cultural idea of a saviour who sacrifices himself. Gatsby's death is a "holocaust." Gatsby believes in the American Dream more than any character we have encountered all year including the founding father Ben Franklin. More than anything else, the American Dream is the belief that you can make your world exactly the way you like it as long as you try hard enough. Gatsby has tried really hard to get his American Dream, so hard that it destroys him. He had worked hard and created an amazing life, but he was so focused on Daisy that he could never be happy. The Dream, like the light, was always out of his grasp, but yet always appeared close enough that with a little more push he could grab it. Gatsby literally died in his pursuit of the American Dream. Part of the American Spirit is never giving up and always having faith that you will eventually triumph and that you can do anything, so a hero would be someone who never gives up that hope and keeps trying even though it destorys him. Don't you see the (apparent) nobility in that? I do. I have been too immersed in American culture since my birth not to root for the lone guy who never gives up hope against all odds. It is a sad thing, but sometimes you need to learn to accept that somethings really are hopeless. You need to give up on them and settle. Like I said, its sad, it seems a lot less heroic, but it seems much more mature. This immaturity and coming to maturity is another thing that Gatsby shares with his country. America was the known as the land of oppurtunity. America, against all odds, had made itself a world power, just as Gatsby had made himself a powerful man, and like Gatsby, America in the 1920s was coming to terms with the fact that it could not get everything that it wanted. It was aware of the emptiness of its existance. It too tried to fill the void with unreachable dreams. It is a sad fact, but wanting something is a lot of the times more exciting than actually having it. America lived in a dream and people were starting to wake up to it. You can see then, in this context, a man like Gatsby who won't stop trying even to his own death, is horribly tragic, but also, really heroic.