Great Gatsby Essay

  Is Gatsby’s desire for success—however we define it—evidence of the American dream, obsession, a personal sense of honor, or something else? Does Gatsby symbolize our culture and even our own desires, or is he an outlier?

     Gatsby to me looks like the typical American man in the 1920’s, not that I’ve ever met one from that era. He was rich, he liked to party, he loved, and he even felt lonely nothing out of the ordinary. I feel like Gatsby does symbolize our culture and our desires. Everyone wants to be rich, have money, buy an infinite amount of materialistic things and that’s exactly what he wanted and did do in fact. Gatsby was rich and threw parties everyday to captured Daisy’s attention, the celebrities now throw parties for attention because if they didn’t want attention they would throw secret parties. Everyone especially in this generation wants to be famous and they want to have brand things to “flex” on social media to show that there so much better than any regular person.

     In the 1920’s it wasn’t so hard to get rich and so mostly everyone did and now it’s somewhat hard to get rich and famous unless you work for it really hard or do something stupid and it goes viral. Another “American Dream” that we have is to go to school get into a good university, get a good job and get paid well isn’t that why so many immigrants come to the U.S? Isn’t America the place everyone wants to come to for whatever economic reason. Our desire for success gets bigger as we get older. As kids we don’t even care nor think about the future but as soon as you get older and graduate high school the only option besides stop going to school is to think of what you want to do because that will decide how you live your life. I don’t think anyone thinks that they want to graduate high school and live with there moms all there life so they will strive to make their future better so they can have money either enough or more. Everyone like Gatsby wanted success and that’s why I think he really symbolizes our culture right now.