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How Does The American Dream Negatively Affect People

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The American Dream

The American Dream is defined as ¨the ideal that every US citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative¨, according to dictionary.com. The American Dream has influenced many people's decisions since people started moving to America from England and other countries. Ever since than most Americans have wanted to reach the American dream and that has led to a bunch of different authors to write about this. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather and Lorraine Hansberry use the same tones and themes to suggest that the American dream can negatively affect people because it makes people focus on wealth and success.
In the Great Gatsby The American Dream …show more content…

However, In this story The American Dream is shown in a different way. This story is about a young boy named paul who desires the more expensive things in life and he wants to live more luxurious. As he grows up, he watches his dad live in the middle class. He is not satisfied with the middle class and as he grows up he wants to have more money and live a more luxurious life. Also, money and wealth has became everything that paul desires and one of the only things he wants. Paul “had not a hundred dollars left and he knew now, more than ever, that money was everything, the wall that stood between all he loathed and all he wanted” (Cather 1). This quote from the story further proves the point that all that Paul wanted was money. Little did Paul know that this was a bad thing because it ended up leading to the demise of him because instead of wanted a basic American Dream he decided to go for the more luxurious version of The American Dream. As he went to New York and realized that he could not live the lifestyle that he wanted to, then he did not want to live at all. This shows that the pursuit of money could lead to greed, drastic life changing decisions and could completely change a

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