Dreams, Desires and Destruction: An Analysis of American Success

According to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, dreams are a gateway to the unconscious mind and an individual’s deepest desires (scientificamerican.com 1). The American Dream is about gaining a large success through hard work. Deep down every individual wants to strive to achieve the best at what they acquire. However, not everyone will attain their life long goals. This is evident in The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and There Will Be Blood written by Paul Thomas Anderson. Between these two texts the destruction of hopes and dreams can derive from smaller issues such as the lack of money, the anger and jealousy of others and the disappointment of impossibly high goals.
Obtaining all the riches in one’s life can be a difficult task to pursue, failing to do so can lead to the despair and emptiness of an individual. Likewise, in the first 14 minutes of the film There Will be Blood
“Interpersonal rejection and physical pain caused desire for money to increase,” (Zhou 700). No matter how broken an individual would be they still attain the desire to seek money, they worked in all kinds of dangerous situations to strive for success although it resulted in them getting severely injured. In the end of the film, the dream was over after the explosion and so Daniel let himself go, due to the fact they did not achieve his goal, he sold his well and decided to live in misery and became a drunk after. Furthermore, the same idea was seen in the novel The Great Gatsby, however, instead of riches, his dream was to marry Daisy Buchanan. Although due to his financial standard when they had met, he was not capable of marrying her simply because “rich girls do not marry poor boys,” (Fitzgerald 127). Gatsby saw Daisy as his pot of gold and without her he was left with an emptiness inside of him because