The Universal Dream

            Saturday night, I was watching The Internship when I realized that Nick was quoting Harlem, by Langston Hughes, when he quit his job as a mattress salesman to take a risk and join his friend, Billy, for an internship interview at Google. Nick reasons, “…because I don’t know ‘what happens to dream a deferred. Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or does it explode?’ I don’t want to find out,” quits, and leaves for the interview. Billy and Nick beat the odds regardless of their less-than-stellar educational background and are accepted into the internship program due to their unique views of life. Once in the program, however, they are outcasts, and just like African Americans in The Raisin in the Sun they are singled out, segregated from the rest of the interns, cast off into the group of rejects, and continuously bullied by the “superior group” of interns.

Billy, Nick, and their group of outcasts encounter enormous difficulties; however, their teamwork and bonding allowed them to overcome all the challenges and win jobs at Google. In the beginning, Billy says, “Aren’t you tired of asking for just enough to get by? I want to do something that matters. I want to have a life that I’m excited about and that’s great… Nick we have our future waiting.” This dream of achieving more and creating a better future is universal; it is shared by the Younger family and still lives on in today’s generation, too. It motivates even those whom everyone believes destined to failure and insubordination to persevere and never give up on their dreams. With the strength of their family and their dreams, perhaps the Youngers, too, will overcome all odds and create a better future.

Take your own advice, Fitzgerald.

It is said that Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels are based off of his own life. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby and Nick are representations of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Daisy is Zelda. Daisy is portrayed as a corrupt, careless girl fixated on wealth and extravagance, even “her voice is full of money” (Fitzgerald 120). She has been Gatsby’s dream since the day they met. He was a soldier and she was the Southern belle, but she would not marry him until he became rich and famous. So Gatsby set off to earn Daisy’s love at any cost, becoming corrupt and materialistic in the process.

Fitzgerald must have been extremely insightful in order to recognize all of the problems in his life and admit it, too; however, he must have also been corrupt, just like the characters in his novels, in order to continue living with it. He criticizes society’s thirst for wealth and the immorality that resulted, but he himself participated in this as well. Zelda was his dream, and, like Gatsby, Fitzgerald strove to attain wealth in order to achieve this dream. He satirizes the silliness of drunken men, but he, too, was a drunken man. He criticizes Daisy and Tom’s need to cheat on each other and shows both affairs ending in death. He even foresees that the moral decay will be punished. But even though Fitzgerald saw and understood the rampant corruption of the 1920s at a time when others were merely reveling in it, he did not attempt to separate himself from it either.