Myths and heroes : To what extend is the AD still alive?

Myths and heroes

        In class, we studied the American dream, this theme is liked to the notion myths and heroes:

- a myth can be defined as a story about gods or heroes, it can be a popular belief or a tradition.

- a hero can be a mythological figure, a person who is admired for his achievements, a superhero or maybe a role model.

        Thus, we will try to answer the following question: To what extend is the AD still alive?

To illustrate the notion, we will interest in 3 documents, I will start with Barack Obama as a symbol of the AD. Then, I will try to show that the AD is accessible to everyone. To finish with, I will explain the limits of the AD.

        The American dream is the idea that any person living in the United States, by this work, his courage and his determination can become rich, or that he can fulfill his dreams. This idea was embodied by many migrants who came to the United States.

        First, I will be interested in Barack Obama’s case who represents a symbol of American dream through a letter written by the former US president himself. The document is an autobiography because we can see the use of the first person, it is entitled “dreams from my father” and it was published in 1995. The scene takes place in New York In Manhattan. The narrator describes his life to his father, that of a homeless person who has no place to sleep since he just arrived in this city to study at Colombia which is a posh university. To get to Manhattan, the narrator had to take the plane and the subway. There is an accumulation of places as a result we can say that the character is bold. At the end, we discover that the narrator is Barack Obama which is surprising because he started from the bottom to the top.
He embodies the American dream because he became the first black American president when nothing predestined him.

        In a second part, I am going to show that the American Dream is an accessible reality, let’s take for example the interview of Liz Murray, a young girl who used to be homeless, in this interview she explain that she used to sleep on the street, on subway or at a friend’s house in order to make her work done. Liz Murray got good marks, so she wrote an essay to the NYT to get in Harvard University. She won a scholarship, as a consequence she was admitted to Harvard and then she stopped being homeless. The moral of her story is that even if it’s complicated and seems to be impossible, with perseverance and of course a lot of work we can success to reach our own goal. Liz Murray is a self-made woman and that is the spirit of the American Dream.

        However, even if the American Dream is embodies by many heroes, it could be sometimes a myth, indeed, let’s talk about the picture entitled “at the time of Louisville flood”, we can see in this picture a strong contrast between advertising and reality. The black American present in the picture did not succeed the American Dream, while the advertising behind these people is encouraging to come to the United States to realize the American dream with the slogan "there’s no way like the American way”.

...