Spiritual shallowness in The Great Gatsby The American Dream was based on the assumption that every person, regardless of their origins, could succeed in life solely on the basis of their own abilities and effort . The dream was embodied in the ideal of the self-made man. The Great Gatsby is a novel about what happened to the American dream in the 1920s, a time when the old values ​​that gave substance to the dream had been corrupted by the vulgar pursuit of wealth. Spiritual superficiality is represented in The Great Gatsby through the characters' pursuit of power and pleasure, character groupings and images, and forgotten pasts. The characters in The Great Gatsby are Midwesterners who have come east in search of this new dream of money and fame. , success, glamor and excitement. Tom and Daisy must have a huge house, a stable of polo ponies and friends in Europe. Gatsby must have his own huge mansion before he can feel confident enough to try to win over Daisy. The energy that could have been spent in the pursuit of noble goals has been channeled into the pursuit of power and pleasure, and into a very flashy, but fundamentally empty form of success. Fitzgerald employs clearly defined groups of characters and various images and symbols in developing the theme. . The groups of characters include Nick, the observer and commentator, who sees what went wrong, Gatsby, who purely lives the dream, and Tom, Daisy, and Jordan, the "foul dust" who are the prime examples of the dream's corruption. The main images and symbols used are the green light, Dr. TJ Eckleburg's eyes, the image of the East and Midwest, Owl Eyes, Dan Cody's yacht; and religious terms such as Grail and incarnation. Both the groupings of characters and the images and symbols suggest a second main theme which can be called "sight and intuition". The novel contains many images of blindness, perhaps because almost no one seems to "see" what is really happening. The characters have little knowledge of themselves and even less knowledge of each other. Especially Gatsby: he lacks the intuition to understand what is happening. He never truly sees Daisy or himself, so blinded is he by his dream. The only characters who see, as in "understand", are Nick and Owl Eyes.