From frivolous pearls to hair tinged with the smell of champagne and parties, the 20s were all jazz. The twenties were a time to be alive; the rich had everything: they were at the top of the chain and no one could bring them down. The lower class strived for the “American Dream,” a dream composed of material possessions and glamor that defined “success,” which the lower class could only dream of. F. Scott Fitzgerald breathed this era and “embodied in its fabrics…the fluid polarities of the American experience: success and failure, illusion and disillusion, dream and nightmare” (Callahan 1). In this insightful American masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald illuminates the gradual decline of the American dream of the Roaring Twenties through contrasts of characters and settings to illustrate the frivolity and lack of morality of the era . Jay Gatsby, a dreamer of dreams, tangled in a set of webs formed by intangible dreams woven from the past, illuminating "the romantic expansion of life's possibilities to a level where the material and the spiritual have become inextricably conflated", as critic Marius Bewley (1) says. With beads hanging from the corners of the canvases, Gatsby believed in a green light passing through his West Egg mansion, which reflected his belief "in an orgastic future that recedes year by year before us", which resided in the heart of Daisy Fay. Buchanan, who radiated everything Gatsby thought of the American dream: status, wealth and beauty. (Fitzgerald 193). Born as James Gatz of North Dakota, Gatsby "is not so much his identity with an American tradition of hard work and 'luck and courage,' but rather his dreamer side, his imprisonment in 'a universe of ineffable garish” which illustrates... ... middle of paper ... the corruption of the woman who held Gatsby's heart, was honest Nick. At the beginning of the novel, Nick Carraway writes to his readers: "I tend to reserve all my judgments, a habit which has opened me up to many curious natures and which has also made me the victim of many annoying veterans..." ( Fitzgerald 1), painted by Fitzgerald to show Nick's kindness to his readers. So, as "the rich get poorer and the poor have children", the American dream was changing in the 1920s as the stock market was booming and World War I was over. Through the frivolous Buchanans and the honest Nick, and the duality of New York, F. Scott Fitzgerald showed us the deterioration of the American dream that he himself saw and experienced during the time of Gatsby the Dreamer. “No-Gatsby turned out okay in the end; that's what attacked Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams" (Will 2).