earticle

영어

This paper aimed at reexamining the meaning of American Dream by examining the novels of 1890s and 1920s: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and The Great Gatsby. In Maggie, Crane presented the hopeless American society of the 1890s by the naturalistic and impressionistic description for the harsh reality behind the ‘gilded’ Bowery streets of New York. In the society that everybody deluded one another, all the characters in Maggie stayed unstable and apathetic, and in the sterile environment, they struggled for staying alive, and they had no concern for other lives. Their pure and real intentions of dreams were distorted as frustration of reality. Crane described this absurd reality from the disgusting and frightful representation for the American society at that era. And in The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald tried to find the ideal values of American Dream by the various aspects of American society. Though we tried to find the positive meaning of American Dream from the novel, but the process of Gatsby’s dream had absurd and negative ways for pursuing it. And the absurdities of the American society after the materialization made their lives degenerated from their ethics for hope and success. From those point of views, we might find the dual representation for the reality of American Dream in The Great Gatsby. In conclusion, the novels examined in this article presented the similar but the different ways of understanding the reality of American ideals between frustration and unheard-of hope without reality.