The Great Gatsby and Glengarry Glen Ross

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The American dream, this is what draws the most people to move to America, whether it be legally or illegally. Everyone wants a piece of this dream. To people who look at America this dream means the perfect life. This is one of the similarities concerning the American dream in both The Great Gatsby and Glengarry Glen Ross. Both of these literary works have the American dream as a fundamental theme throughout. The ideas shared in both of these works range from success and freedom to self-creation and failure. These works portray these ideas in two different lights. However, are the ideas that they show truly so different?
Success is defined as an accomplishment of an act or purpose. The title character of The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby, demonstrates this. Gatsby came from the dumps, but he was in love with Daisy. The only problem was that Daisy was in love with money. Gatsby knows this because at one point of the novel he states that: “Her voice is full of money” (93). So for Gatsby to win her love, and convince her to leave her husband, he needed to get some money. After five years Gatsby had earned enough money to, hopefully, win Daisy’s love back. He threw elaborate parties almost every week, hoping that someone would come and bring Daisy. Gatsby is successful when Nick comes to one of his parties and just so happens to be Daisy’s cousin. Gatsby is also successful when he wins Daisy’s love back. Even Daisy’s husband can tell that she is in love with someone when he exclaims: “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife” (99). While Gatsby eventually reaches his goal, albeit only for a sort time, only one of the characters in Glengarry Glen Ross actually has success in the rea...

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...of the works,
While both of the works show the same ideas, they show them in different ways. One shows that success can happen without a minuscule amount of failure, the other that there is no success without failure. Both of the literary works show that it is important to have self-creation in order to live the American dream. Individualism is depicted much more in The Great Gatsby than in Glengarry Glen Ross. Finally, freedom is shown in both as the exact same thing, the ability to do as you desire, no matter the outcome. All-in-all the way that both of these works depict the American dream is far more similar than anyone might think.

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Scribner, 2003. eBook.
Glengarry Glen Ross. Foley, James. New Line Cinema, 1992. Film.
Mamet, David. Glengarry Glen Ross. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1982. Print.

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