Part 2-Michael（Yinmin）Xu-Restriction on cognition in the Great Gatsby

Children under threat of the American Dream

In my opinion, American Dream restricts children's cognition of the world even in their childhood by the exaggerated power of wealth. Childhood is the tmie period that people learn things form outside. If the whole society consider the work as the only way to get success and the direct result of working is money, then children is likely to remember this kind of materialism thought. That will make children take earning money as their only dream which deprives all the other meaningful things in life from them and builds up a mammonish world for them.

In the book “The Great Gatsby”, Gatsby is the person who was affected by American Dream since he was only a child. His cognition of the world had been changed by the materialism in his childhood. Although he became rich when he grew up, I thought he was not a success man. He spent his whole life on money and abandoned all the other things since he gave up his real name as he was a child. There is no way for him to pick up his life again because the world view had been fixed on his deep mind. It is showed by “his parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them as parents at all.”

Gatsby’s imagination was the American Dream for him, which is to be a rich man in that society. It shows that his cognition of the world had been manipulated by the American Dream since he got the ability to cognize it. It also trapped him and made him gave up all the things. The American dream formed a materialism world in his mind which makes the power of money stronger than everything else. Children should be the most innocent ones, however, Gatsby’s name, his background even his parents was abandoned when he was a child. It reveals Gatsby lost his rationality and emotion since he was denying himself and his parents and the American Dream had a powerful influence. If the American Dream can affected Gatsby so strongly, then it has the ability to restrict everyone’s world view like that. People were not equal to get success, instead, they were the same because they all fought for money and forgot the more meaningful things such as relationship with others and their own dream. They became the working machines.

 Although this kind of restriction on cognition is obviously ridiculous, the Media still calls on people by the “American Dream” in this way nowadays. They say that growing up to earn more than their parents is the American Dream for children. When children are at the age of receipting information, these medias can easily change them like playing with plastic clay. Their lives are limited as an only way of getting money. It can be predict that their will be more and more “Gatsby clay doll” in the future.





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