F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Critique of the American Dream

The following paper is a bit of a milestone of mine, as it is the last academic paper of my undergraduate career. Be that as it may, it is by no means a work of genius, nor is it my best paper (at least by my account). In any case, if you happen to be a hardcore Fitzgerald fan such as myself, or even have an interest in that grand old American myth known as the American Dream, this paper is for you.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Critique of the American Dream

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s earlier fiction, the short stories “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” critique, among other things, the abuse of wealth throughout American history, and the effect that this flagrant abuse of wealth has had on the fabled American dream. As this paper will go on to prove, F. Scott Fitzgerald asserts that the abuse of wealth in the United States has, rather ironically, soiled the idea that in America, everyone who comes to its shores, works hard, and makes sacrifices can be successful beyond his or her wildest dreams. He accomplishes this feat through the showcasing of the exploits of the Washington family in the more relevant of the two stories, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” and the crushing disillusionment of Bryan Dalyrimple in one of his least critiqued short stories, “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong.” In them, both sets of characters come to see wealth at its absolute worst, with the young veteran Dalyrimple coming to see wealth in a rather Marxist light, in that it is a source of inequality, while the Washington family, particularly its patriarch, Braddock Washington, falls under the spell of its nigh infinite wealth and believes to the utmost ridiculously degree that money can, indeed, solve anything.

The thing is however, the entire argument of this paper hinges upon what the definition of the American dream actually is, and how, over the decades, it has actually been defined. For if indeed the American dream really is just the acquisition of vast sums of material wealth through hard work, then, well, the Washington family has, by definition, achieved the American dream to its highest possible culmination. Of course, in that regard, Bryan Dalyrimple’s story is slightly different. He does not, by the story’s end, achieve vast stockpiles of material wealth, but he does acquire another quality attributed to the realization of the American dream: political power. With this fate as his story’s end result, and after his, albeit short-lived, fame as a battle-hardened war veteran, then surely Bryan Dalyrimple has also achieved the mysterious phenomena known as the American dream. But, did he and the Washington family really do it? Did they really achieve the spirit of that age-old, red-white-and-blue institution, the American dream?

Well, according to Jim Cullen, author of The American Dream, and his quoting of James Truslow Adams, a 1930s historian of American history who allegedly first coined the phrase itself, “‘[the] American dream [is] a better, richer, and happier life for all out citizens of every rank, which is the greatest contribution we have made to the thought and welfare of the world’” (Cullen, 4). Of course, the Washingtons are no doubt ‘rich’ (and arguably ‘better’ if one counts being ‘rich’ as being ‘better’), but are they ‘happy’? What about Bryan Dalyrimple? Is he ‘happy’? He certainly wields great political power by the end of his story, and he will also undoubtedly acquire a nice sum of wealth from his terms in the state senate. However, do these things ultimately make him ‘better’? Will these things ultimately make him ‘happy’? Such questions though only lead to more ambiguities. As Cullen goes on to state, quoting Adams once again and chiming in his own opinion, “‘[the] dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man’ may be fine as far as it goes, but the devil is in the details: just what does ‘better and richer and fuller’ mean?” (Cullen, 7).

This is a quite a relevant notion, to be sure, as concretely defining these terms is what holds the ultimate insight of this paper. For, as Cullen continues onward in his very next paragraph, “The answers vary. Sometimes ‘better and richer and fuller’ is defined in terms of money -- in the contemporary United States, one could almost believe this is the only definition -- but there are others. Religious transformation, political reform, educational attainment, sexual expression: the list is endless” (Cullen, 7; first emphasis mine). Such a conclusion only goes on to show that, overall, Bryan Dalyrimple and Braddock Washington only achieve one small part of the picture, and that their wealth and power only count for success in a portion of the American dream, and not all of it, as they may have thought. (Although in all honesty, I do not believe, at any point in either text, the characters explicitly mention the American dream). In this particular case however, as mentioned before, the question becomes: have Bryan and Braddock fulfilled the American dream, and if so, has this made them ‘happy’? Or rather, is the culmination of vast wealth and power truly the American dream, and will this culmination, once reached, make you ‘happy’ as the American dream, at its root, so dearly promises?

For the first possible answer to that burning question, one must look to one of Fitzgerald’s most neglected short stories, “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong.” In it, the audience finds a soon-to-be disillusioned war veteran, Bryan Dalyrimple, and the immense psychological upheaval he experiences at the moment of his disillusion, as well as its eventual consequences. Differentiating greatly from the tale of infinite excess in “Diamond,” “Dalyrimple” is essentially a tale of too little, with its main character, Bryan, working a long and boring dead-end grocery job for much, much longer than he intended, and then finding out, through sheer happenstance, that one of his fellow employees, a newer worker and the grocery owner’s relative, is already earning a higher wage than he is, even though Bryan is the senior worker (“Dalyrimple,” 9).

This, of course, sends Dalyrimple into a passionate rage, as he is angered over the inequality of his workplace and the idea that he has been pushed around and bullied by the establishment long enough. In essence, he is angry that he never quite got his fair share, or rather, that his fame in coming home from the war simply did not last. As Robert Merill offers in his article, “‘Dalyrimple Goes Wrong’: The Best of the Neglected Early Stories,” “Fitzgerald makes it clear that celebrating war heroes is a ritualistic gesture with virtually no real meaning to an American public that has no conception of what war is like” (Merill, 28; emphasis mine).

In other words, as Dalyrimple begins to realize that he really is just another person, no one out of the ordinary, he begins to feel as though not only is he under appreciated, but that the American dream, the idea responsible for his fame as a war hero, has failed him in some way, and failed him horribly. And so, like any other do-it-yourself American, he decides to make up his own dream. As Fitzgerald himself states:

He was more than Byronic now: not the spiritual rebel, Don Juan; not the philosophical rebel, Faust; but a new psychological rebel of his own century -- defying the sentimental a priori forms of his own mind -- (“Dalyrimple,” 13)

While paying special attention to the very next sentence in the paragraph:

Happiness was what he wanted -- a slowly rising scale of gratifications of the normal appetites -- and he had a strong conviction that the materials, if not the inspiration of happiness, could be bought with money. (“Dalyrimple,” 14)

This proves, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that not only is Fitzgerald critiquing the American dream within the context of the war hero and how, upon return, they find only fleeting fame, but also that to Dalyrimple, and by proxy, according to Fitzgerald, the American public, believe that happiness, and by extension the American dream, can only be measured in material wealth. That is to say, the richer one is, the happier they must therefore be.

Understandably, this would correctly coincide with Bryan Dalyrimple’s story. He begins the narrative as a popular war veteran who is hailed in his city as a hero, only to find out that his wealth faded with time. Left poor and working a pointless job, as well as feeling entitled to the same level of public spotlight that he had felt when he came home, Dalyrimple asks for a raise, only come to find out that, in fact, he was nowhere near as important as he once thought he was. And so, seeking to fill the void left by his disillusionment, he goes on a crime spree to accumulate wealth, and, in essence, fulfill the American dream he thought had left him. As Robert Merill most succinctly states, “Reasoning thus, Dalyrimple embarks on a series of robberies intended to provide the funds hard work promises never to offer” (Merill, 31).

The thing is though, despite all of what Merrill calls Dalyrimple’s “Zarathustrian rationalizations” (Merrill, 33), he fails to notice what actually happens to his future at the end of the story. Having sought fame, power, and fortune for so long at the expense of his own morality (“Dalyrimple,” 13), Bryan completely fails to realize that in order to finally gain the power that he so desires, he must ultimately turn his back on everything he has worked for in his nightly tirades by becoming a state senator. As Merrill asserts, “Now [that] he is offered what he wants -- money, security, a touch of power -- he will [have to] agree to do the older men’s bidding…In the end all Dalyrimple must do to achieve his goals is give up any pretense to independence” (Merrill, 33). And looking back to our working definitions of the American dream, is a man who cannot control his own fate living out its ideals, regardless of what American dream he holds dear? Is a man who thinks he is happy for living the lifestyle that others wish him to live truly happy? I think not.

Moving on to the second possible answer as to whether or not F. Scott Fitzgerald’s other short story, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” can be said to critique the American dream, well, the answer is an astounding yes. Fitzgerald’s “Diamond” has by far the largest and most condemning critique of the legendary American dream out of all of Fitzgerald’s short fiction, with even some critics, as Lawrence Buell states in his essay, “The Significance of Fantasy in Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction,” “treat[ing] it as a prelude to Gatsby” (Buell, 34). In the story itself, we find the story of a young man named John T. Unger and his precarious adventures involving the Washington family, a family that been subsisting in vast, nearly god-like wealth for the last several generations due to its owning of a diamond that is, quite literally, as big as the Ritz Carlton hotel. Of course, the only way for the Washingtons to hold on to their immense fortune is to keep it a secret and hidden away in a part of Montana “that’s never been surveyed” (“Diamond,” 4) via a series of state-department manipulations on Braddock’s part, and ultimately killing anyone who comes to find out about the diamond itself.

The critiques of the American dream present within “Diamond” should be obvious at this point in the text, considering the blatant display of the themes involved. For one, the idea of being so insanely wealthy that one has to keep it secret flies directly in the face of how wealth is ordinarily perceived in America. As mentioned before, Cullen argues that money is the only definition of success in the United States, and so if your neighbor does not understand how truly wealthy you are, well, then what is the whole point of struggling for wealth anyway? Secondly, the working definition of the American dream, as Truslow Adams first proctored, implied that if one were richer, one would be freer, one would be more fulfilled than if left poor. After reviewing the Washingtons secluded, very secluded, lifestyle, how could one even bare to conclude that the Washingtons are freer than other men? They are not free at all, Braddock Washington being the least free of the whole family. Their wealth has trapped them in the very mountains of their own wealth forever.

The critique of the age-old American institution also manages to manifest itself in other parts of the text as well, as, after all, Buell states once again that, “[Diamond] is his most succinct critique of the American dream” (Buell, 30). Specifically, the narrative style of the story itself is written like a dream, as, to borrow from Buell once again, “the story is narrated in such a way as continually to flaunt its own illusoriness” (Buell, 31). That is to say, what would be a better way for Fitzgerald to narrate a story critiquing the American dream, other than to write the actual story like a dream itself? To use vivid imagery, fantastic details, and surrealist settings is the perfect way to portray a dream, while adding in the Washington family, descended from the first president of America himself, to further secure the image of critiquing one of the most sacred of American cultural institutions in all its history.

There is also the question of arrogance present within the context of vast material wealth to be found in Fitzgerald’s critiques of not only the American dream, but also of vulgar displays of power as well. In the last few pages of “Diamond” for example, the audience is left with a most surreal and terrifying image, the image of a lone and desperate Braddock Washington attempting to bribe God with his riches (“Diamond,” 22-26). This is ultimately what I think Fitzgerald was trying to get at, especially in his later work. He was trying to show that with enough money and enough power, with the American dream, forgive my lack of a better phrase, gone horribly awry, people could develop the kind of arrogance necessary to believe that they, based purely on wealth alone, were equal to that of God himself. It almost sounds out of place, the theme of hubris, in a modern text like this, but like all texts concerning blasphemy, they always manage to somehow find their place.

Being sure to keep this in mind, any observer of Braddock and Bryan can see that neither of the two men are happy, even though they have theoretically acquired all of the essential elements necessary to qualify for the achievement of the American dream. Dalyrimple, for one, is a war hero wielding fame who eventually becomes a state senator with previously no experience in the field whatsoever, while Washington, on the other hand, is immensely rich and related directly to the first president of the United States, not to mention owning a small army of slaves who have no idea that the North won the Civil War. Sure, these men should be happy, the ‘happy’ as defined by Adams and Cullen mentioned earlier, but they are not. They are two of the truest examples of grotesque, broken men.

Although, in light of their existence, what does their critique ultimately say about the state of the American dream? Is it gone now, because of the billionaire capitalists and the corrupt politicians that Bryan and Dalyrimple were so obviously modeled off of, or is it still an actual phenomenon that is attainable by anyone who comes to America, works hard, and makes sacrifices to become successful? Did it, quite terrifyingly, even exist at all? Going back to Cullen’s work, he asserts that, “The problem with the American dream…is not exactly that its corrupt or vain. Indeed the great paradox of The Great Gatsby is that even as Gatsby pursues his dream…through fraud…there is a deeply compelling purity about his ambition” (Cullen, 182). That is to say, the idea itself is not flawed, but rather, the paths in which Bryan and Braddock took to reach their dreams were flawed. Flawed men, arguably, have flawed dreams. But, as Cullen goes on to say later in the paragraph:

What makes the American Dream American is not that our dreams are any better, worse, or more interesting than anyone else’s, but that we live in a country constituted of dreams, whose very justification continues to rest on it being a place where one can, for better and worse, pursue distant goals. (182)

Of course, this kind of message reveals great promise for who still believe, like I do, in the American dream, and worry about those, like Dalyrimple and Washington, who wish to apparently use its promises for less-than-noble causes.

In any case, we ultimately have to conclude that upon examining the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” and “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong,” the characters Bryan Dalyrimple and Braddock Washington exemplify the kind of wickedness, whether intentional or unintentional, of those who have soiled the promise of the American dream both within the time period in which they were written, the early twentieth century, and the contemporary era of the twenty-first. They, despite having accumulated vast wealth and power, lacked seemingly the most important tenet of the American dream, happiness, and instead, through their riches, spread only pain and suffering or the corruption of statewide politics. Thus it can be said, that while they did in fact achieve some aspects of the traditional American dream, they really made manifest more of an anti-American dream, which, in retrospect, I suppose was Fitzgerald’s point all along. He wanted to show the audience past the myths in the American media and the up-and-coming print culture and present to them the downsides of the American dream, if there really was such a thing at all, and he wanted to show, I think, most importantly, what the American dream was, by showing us what it is not.

Works Cited

Buell, Lawrence. “The Significance of Fantasy in Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction.” The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Approaches in Criticism. Ed. Jackson R. Bryer. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. 23-38.

Cullen, Jim. The American Dream. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Dalyrimple Goes Wrong. 1920. Feedbooks.com. http://gutenberg.org.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. A Diamond as Big as the Ritz. 21 January 1998. http://www.sc.ed./fitzgerald/diamond/diamond.html.

Merill, Robert. “‘Dalyrimple Goes Wrong’: The Best of the Neglected Early Stories.” New Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Neglected Stories. Ed. Jackson R. Bryer. Columbia, Missouri: The University of Missouri Press, 1996. 24-34.

Subject 234

Hey, here's another one that's missing. What's going on?

Don't worry, dear reader, this is just another one of those stories I have floating around in some unlucky editor's hands, and so I can't have it readable anywhere in cyberspace.

Rest assured, if the editor passes, I'll have it back up in no time for your reading pleasure.

Thanks so much for your readership,

The House of Dane