F. Scott Fitzgerald's evolving American Dream: the "pursuit of happiness" in Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1996 by John F. Callahan

The first thing to be said about Fitzgerald's novels is that these enactments of the American dream are expressed in the love affairs and worldly ambitions of Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and Monroe Stahr. In The Great Gatsby (TGG), Tender Is the Night, and The Last Tycoon, the matrix of the dream differs, but in each case, the hero is, like Fitzgerald, "a man divided," yet he seeks to integrate love of a woman with accomplishment in the world. Telling his story to Nick Carraway after he has lost Daisy Fay for the second and last time, Gatsby remembers that when he first met her, he felt like the latest plunderer in the line of Dan Cody, his metaphorical father, and a mythical figure who, in Fitzgerald's interpretation, "brought back to the Eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon." Sensitive to the demarcations of background, money, and status, Gatsby

knew he was in Daisy's house by a colossal accident. However

glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a

penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders.

Meanwhile, "he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe he was a person from much the same stratum as herself." Jay Gatsby pursues Daisy knowing that her sense of happiness and the good life depends on money and property. Nevertheless, "he took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously--eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand" (TGG 76, 113). Ironically, Gatsby's lieutenant's uniform allows him proximity to Daisy simply as a man long enough to seduce her.

Until Gatsby makes love to Daisy, he projects little soul or feeling, only a self-absorbed passion mixed up with his urge to defy American boundaries of class, status, and money. The experience of love deeply moves and changes Gatsby, but so pervasive is the culture of material success that his new reverence and tenderness toward her are inseparable from money and possessions, and perhaps from Carraway's image of Daisy "gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor"--Gatsby's struggles, maybe, as a boy and penniless young man in North Dakota and Minnesota. Earlier that same day in 1922, Gatsby calls Daisy's voice a voice "full of money." But his subsequent words to Carraway about that experience of love in wartime 1917, a time that obscured boundaries of class and background in favor of a seemingly all-powerful fluidity and equality, convey the mystery and tenderness of his earlier emotion. "I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport," Gatsby tells Carraway in his sometimes too well-chosen words whose tone nonetheless carries a touch of wonder. "I even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but she didn't, because she was in love with me too." The more vividly Gatsby remembers, the more the tricks of his voice yield to the feeling underneath. "She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her.... Well, there I was, `way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care" (TGG 114, 91, 114).