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The Great Gatsby describes some people living in the fictional town of West Egg in the summer of 1922. The story primarily tells that a young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby strives to win back his beautiful former lover Daisy Buchanan. As Fitzgerald’ s magnum opus, The Great Gatsby explores “themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream (Hoover, 2013，Sova, 2011).”
While as generally acknowledged, Autobiography is the real experience of Franklin, it also has some fictional elements. In the Autobiography, the accurate arrangement of the exact time when to rest and work is quite impractical in the eyes of ordinary people, where exaggerated approach should be used .Plus, the tone he used in the work is humble, but in fact he is proud, for example, he hopes that Autobiography can guide the descendants. Therefore, although the Autobiography is Franklin' s own experience, it still has some fictional composition.
Similarly, The Great Gatsby is a fictional novel, but also it reflects its author Fitzgerald' s experience and the epitome of that era. “He and Gatsby have a very similar experience, and one even can say that Gatsby is another Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald fell in love with a beautiful and rich girl when he was at college. Although the girl was in love with him, she listened to her father's suggestion that a poor boy was not qualified to marry a millionaire's daughter and got married to a wealthy businessman. The poverty and the abandonment of the lover made Fitzgerald misunderstand that material is everything, and he mistakenly thought that he could pursue love as long as he is wealthy. This experience is quite similar with Gatsby(孙洪梅：2015）.” Based on the above analysis and research, the two works are quite similar and can be compared.
Gatsby, as the main character of The Great Gatsby, is the representative personage of the “Jazz Age”. The American dream deeply inside him is exactly the mainstream value of his age. Meanwhile, the American dream of Franklin is also the public’s thought in the early period of American independence. Both of them have the same faith while the truth is that they got totally different outcomes, so what differences lie between the value of Franklin and Gatsby and what happened during the 200 years is the main research direction of the essay.
This essay consists three chapters.
The first chapter discusses the connotation of the American dream Franklin represents. Autobiography, as narrative articles of Franklin’ s own experience, includes many of the ideas of Franklin’ s American dream .On the analysis of its can I found that the American dream Franklin represents contains the ideas of pragmatism and humanitarian.
The second chapter discusses the connotation of the American dream Gatsby represents. The Great Gatsby, as Fitzgerald’ s description of the Jazz Age, has a lot of characteristics of the times. Gatsby's American dream, likewise, implies the typical idealism and moral fall of the Jazz Age.
The third chapter makes an essentially analysis combining the two eras. Franklin's American dream is influenced by the immigrants who are newly settled Puritans, containing the characteristics of Puritanism; Gatsby influenced by the economic society at that time, is typical of consumerism. This is essentially the difference between them.
Based on the three chapters above, a conclusion can be made : because of the different economic and cultural background, fundamental changes have taken place in the two American dreams.