THEORETICAL–METHODOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE AMERICAN DREAM AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY IN AMERICAN FICTION

Abstract

The American Dream may be defined as a historically produced ideological narrative that promises individual upward mobility through merit, labor, and moral virtue, while simultaneously functioning as a cultural script that legitimizes unequal outcomes by translating structural constraints into personal responsibility. The mechanism through which this narrative operates is discursive: it organizes social perception by linking work ethic to deserved reward, naturalizing market distribution as “fair,” and framing setbacks as temporary or self-caused rather than structurally patterned. A canonical fictional example is Jay Gatsby’s self-invention in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (1925), where the dream’s aspirational grammar is dramatized through reinvention, consumption, and romanticized status acquisition, yet the plot shows how old money and inherited privilege circumscribe access to legitimate recognition.