Failure of the American Dream

Failure Of The American Dream

What is the American Dream? That’s a question everyone is trying to answer. People find it in their own unique ways; money, success, freedom, or love. However, these aren’t easily obtained, and in most situations people figure this out the hard way. People can be immensely wealthy but still fail in their journey to the American dream. A man may be the most successful in the world but in his eyes he may have not reached his American dream. People fight for their dream every day, as colonists they had to fight for our freedom and to pursue our dream. Some think that to obtain their dream and goal is to fall in love, but they may never be able to find or have “the one” and will never truly be in love. The American dream is an unobtainable ideal that everyone is still searching for today.

A lot of the time people visualize the American dream as having money; being rich and wealthy. However this may not work for people. They can have all the money in the world but they will never have obtained or reached what they believe is the American dream. A testament to this idea is Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and he champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his motor-boats slid the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon...

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... the successful salesman he wanted to become. Katniss and Jim both had to fight for freedom they still may not truly achieve. Even in modern times it seems impossible. Many people are poor, moving nowhere career wise. The American Dream is dead.

Works Cited

Adams, James Truslow. The Epic of America. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1931.

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, 2008. Print

Collins, Suzanne. Catching Fire. New York: Scholastic Press, 2009. Print.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Scribner, 1925. Print

Kadlec, Dan. American Dream Withers. Time Co. 2013

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Print

Surowiecki, James. The Mobility Myth. The New Yorker Financial Page, 2014

Twain, Mark. Mark Twain Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Dover Publications, 1994. Print.