NCwall4reflections

=Wall 4 Reflection and References =

= Throughout the year, we have considered the aspirations of Americans to be a defining characteristic of who they are and the country that they live in. We have found that dreamers are sometimes oblivious, sometimes selfish, and are often disillusioned by their dreams instead of distinguishing appearance versus reality. In //The Great Gatsby//, we observe an extreme situation, depicting how Americans can get carried away by their dreams to the point where once they recognize it is only a dream, they are psychologically and emotionally dead. We don't think about what our obsession with dreams insinuates about the future of Americans. Gary Shteyngart proposes an image of the future through protagonist Lenny Abramov. He suggests that the future is a dystopia, and our greed and oblivion have led to a technological takeover of the country, where all information is public, books are extinct, and personal interaction is scarce. Despite reading both novels on the downward spiral of America and its dreamers, I believe that we have the potential of overcoming our oblivion to reality, and we will be able to dream about things that are attainable, as well as about elaborations of what we already have. =

1. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. //The Great Gatsby//. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.

2. Shteyngart, Gary. //Super Sad True Love Story: a Novel//. New York: Random House, 2010.

Wall 1: Puritanism Wall 2: Individual expression in nature Wall 3: The foundation's transition to becoming community oriented Wall 4: The American Future: where dreams may or may not come true