Writer’s block is a phenomenon we all know and abhor whether we proclaim ourselves a writer or not. As someone who does call myself a writer, I am no stranger to this feeling, of thoughts swirling around my head in clumps too thick to detangle leaving the page blank. This is especially frustrating when I study the art of writing consistently as a Writing Fellow and still struggle to communicate complex ideas that first originate out of an abounding imagination. I may be able to reclaim sparse descriptions of the images appearing in my mind as I try to write a poem: maybe “lust,” “glamour,” “a fall from divinity?” But writer’s block has the power to sweep out those clumps of creativity and make them forever inexpressible. I feel myself continually drawn back to moments in The Great Gatsby where Nick Carraway, a man analogous to a sponge soaking up the minutiae of his environment, fails to describe or recall key elements of the story. I have etched in my book “what can’t you say? Say it! Spit it out!” The entire novel has felt like a predictable spiral that Nick unravels all the way up until the final word, so I struggled with how a narrator could not fulfill his only task: to narrate the story he has been soaking up. The confusion and utter frustration I harbored for these moments unsettled me until I realized they were achieving precisely what they intended. The very act of not expressing was expressing it all: the American Dream is a fantasy that only exists within the collective American imagination which thrives off its ability to exclude people from accessing it. In an attempt to tie down a fantasy so incommunicable, people like Jay Gatsby and Ben Braddock of The Graduate infuse their environment and the people around them with luster and extravagance to match the “perfection” of a dream they cannot even verbalize.  

The moments where Nick cannot articulate the essence of the Dream occur when his descriptions reach a sort of crescendo, suggesting that the Dream at its very core is elusive. Just as Nick begins to frame the “orgastic future that year by year recedes before us,” his words fail him (Fitzgerald 180). He admits “it eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...And one fine morning—” but he never finishes his sentence (180). The definition of the Dream can never enter the physical realm, and Nick never verbalizes what it would look like after the crescendo if it did not “recede” but actually reached whatever goal they are striving for. Just as Gatsby tries to link his imagination with the physical world by kissing Daisy, Nick again is overcome with “an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words” (111). A revelation teases the edge of his lips “as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what [he] had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever” (111). The reader never discerns what exactly Nick wants to say at this moment, yet it is apparent through Fitzgerald’s intentional placement of this loss of words directly after the “incarnation” of Gatsby’s dream, that a possible clarification gets as close to the physical world as the breath in Gatsby’s mouth, but cannot cross. Nick’s inability to recall this “phrase” emphasizes the American Dream only exists in the American consciousness, and any attempt to reclaim it from that confinement fails. 

For both Jay Gatsby and Ben Braddock, this reclaiming manifests itself in placing their dreams into the “grail” of a woman. Ben, too, has dreams for himself about what his future will look like after graduation, yet when anyone asks him what they are, he just says “I don’t know.” The same incommunicability seen in The Great Gatsby is therefore evident in The Graduate. As both main characters grapple with defining their dreams, they inevitably push themselves to the edges of their morality—Gatsby with his criminal means of obtaining wealth and Ben with his affair—to attain their “grail” (Daisy and Elaine respectively).  For Gatsby, he must reinvent his entire being to exist in the same social strata as his “grail,” becoming a man of grandeur and extravagance. To begin his chase after the Dream he must manufacture a version of himself that fits the inflated Dream of his imagination. Therefore, this persona of “vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty” he creates is the “ticket” into that collective American consciousness, buying him into a lifestyle where he terminally tries to match his reality to “this conception” to no avail (98). To idealize a dream is to push it beyond the tangible and deeper into the imagination because the tangible in and of itself is imperfect. This idealization is evident in Nick’s retrospective descriptions of New York City. "Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world." (68). The “white heaps” and “sugar lumps” exemplify the gilding the Roaring Twenties is most notable for. Fitzgerald employs whimsical diction to portray New York City, at first glance, as full of life and promise that readily offers itself to whoever dares take it. What is lost in this glorification is what the idealization can do to a person, or even an entire country, as the Dreamers buy into this collective consciousness and perpetuate it. If someone tries to bring something into the physical world that only exists in their idealized imagination, they are doomed to fail. Thus, the inevitability of disaster looms over the entire novel as the reader knows Gatsby’s facade will never see to the realization of his goals. 

Then, to idealize a dream is to also ignore its flaws, whether it be the people it excludes or those it leads to destruction as they chase after it. If the American Dream has become a national marker for the American identity across socioeconomic statuses, I then question the validity and integrity of that American identity as it persists despite the cultural diversity of this country that continues to change throughout history. I wonder who this identity truly belongs to and who is allowed to claim it. National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman leads the reader of her poem “In This Place” in meeting the communities of people who are actively beating against the bounds of the American Dream as they fight for justice and scribe the continuous story of America. Gorman lists the countless groups that constitute her understanding of the American identity: “the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew,/ the native, the immigrant,/ the black, the brown, the blind, the brave,/ the undocumented and undeterred,/ the woman, the man, the nonbinary,/ the white, the trans,/ the ally to all of the above/ and more” (Gorman). In this enumeration, Gorman includes many of the people who are left out of Fitzgerald’s picture of the American identity, asserting that each of these people, and anyone that may fall into multiple of these categories, has the right to pen a poem of their experience, and have it be just as “American” as anyone else’s. 

Gorman celebrates the diversity that Fitzgerald looks down upon, which is apparent as his racial bias manifests itself in Nick’s encounter with African American and Southern European people in New York City. Hoping to flaunt Gastby’s wealth, Nick is “glad that the sight of Gatsby’s splendid car was included in their somber holiday” (69). Nick laughs at the fact that the southeastern Europeans and African Americans believe they have the same chance to achieve the American Dream as he does, revealing the collective American identity is not as inclusive as people proclaim it to be. Nick waves the American Dream in front of their eyes not because he has achieved it, but because it pleases him that they have been left out of it. There exists a barrier between that collective identity of people who are allowed to buy into the Dream and the black or brown or transgender person that looks out their New York City window at “the sidewalk that really formed a ladder”—a ladder that for them has missing rungs and rusting footholds (Fitzgerald 110). Systemic racism is then fueled and perpetuated by Americans who still cling to the Dream swearing the other “ladder” is pristine and shiny, denying the unique experience of marginalized people so they can remain in their fantasy. Therefore, the identity of America lies in the contrast between the myth of individualism and equal opportunity and the concrete experience of systemic exclusion from that opportunity. 

Across these three works spanning from 1920 to 1960 to 2020, it becomes evident that even a century later, the Dream is just as elusive as before. I used to believe the Dream was more alive in the 1920s than it is now, but through The Graduate and “In This Place” I see the vitality of the Dream is not what changed. It is the people's belief in it, or rather the number of people who buy into that collective American consciousness of the Dream. The Dream may seem dead because people are now more comfortable calling out its elusiveness resulting from its idealized characterization. People like Amanda Gorman call attention to the barriers of the Dream not because they believe America has lost its potential for hope but because it cannot exist in the same idealized way. We must recognize the Dream’s flaws that have existed from its birth because we realize we can no longer lust after a dream that was only viable for the white American. Therefore, it is impossible to simply add marginalized groups to the collective consciousness. To create change, we must reconstruct the Dream to include “all of the above” by compelling each person to tell the story of their own uniquely American experiences and add to the collective “American lyric/ we are just beginning to tell” (Gorman).

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Scribner trade pbk. ed. New York: Scribner, 2004.

Gorman, A. (n.d.). “In This Place”. Retrieved March 8, 2021, from https://poets.org/poem/place-

american-lyric 

Mike Nichols, Calder Willingham, Buck. Henry, Lawrence. Turman, Mike. Nichols, Anne Bancroft, Dustin

Hoffman, et al. The Graduate. Special ed., 1999.