The Great Gatsby is a book about the American dream and the means of achieving it. While all the characters in the novel seem to be living this dream, they are really living a life of illusion. They are hollow people who fail to recognize the significance of what life is about. Near the end of the novel Nick (the narrator) ponders how the character of Gatsby "must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about." Throughout The Great Gatsby there is a consistent misconception between reality and illusion. This occurs not only with the characters, but with places and objects in the novel as well. It...