The American Dream - Great Gatsby and Good Will Hunting

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The American Dream is defined as an opportunity to live a better, richer, fuller life that one can enjoy and achieve in America. It is a dream of social order, and a chance to be recognized for what one can be capable of. Some believe that it is crucial that one succeeds. However, success does not mean that life would be enjoyable. Rather, The American Dream should be defined as an opportunity to pursue happiness. In order to pursue that happiness, you would need money, potential, or talent, or even all three in order to be successful. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and the movie Good Will Hunting, screenplay by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, both show examples of people trying to achieve the American Dream. In The Great Gatsby, we are introduced to a man named Gatsby who tries to tie money and success together to find the woman he loves the most, Daisy. Gatsby always held huge parties on weekends to try and impress Daisy, hoping that she’d remember him years later. However, Gatsby was not always this rich. He had gained all his wealth from doing illegal bootlegging of alcohol. Gatsby also had no potential, since he dropped out of Oxford and started out with no money. He decided to tie money and Daisy together, hoping to impress Daisy that his old poor self had changed into one of her kind. However, because Gatsby didn’t have potential or talent, he could not seem to convince Daisy to fall in love with him again, thus ending his pursuit for happiness. Even though his money could have impressed Daisy, his ways of getting money were not impressive, especially because Gatsby had hidden this lie from Daisy for such a long time. It wasn’t long until Tom convinced Daisy that he “sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of [Gastby’s] little stunts” (133). Now that Daisy had found out the truth, she could not love Gatsby anymore for the actions that he’s done.
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