Igby's Father example essay topic
428 words
"Igby goes down" is a story about a seventeen year old boy trying to break out of his American High Society family. There is just one similarity that all members of the family share, they are blood tied. Igby's father had a nervous breakdown and is in a psychiatry. His mother is a very ha table, cold-hearted woman who is not able to live without her "puppies". And finally his three years older brother Oliver. He was the best in his class, goes to Columbia University and is a young Republican. Igby was his entire life in Oliver's shadow. He got kicked out of several schools, was according to his mother a pathological liar and just did not fit in. In the whole movie Igby tries to find his own way of life that is far away from the hypocrisy that he always criticizes. Almost every character in this movie should have been satisfied because they have reached everything.
But the American Dream did not work out. Despite having material success, they are all empty and they never achieved a real goal in life. A good example for that is Igby's father. He was destroyed by the American Dream.
Once when Igby was brushing his teeth, his father came in the bathroom, got in the shower and broke in his desperation the bathing tub glass. While lying in his own blood, Igby's father uttered a sentence that Igby will never forget in his life: "I feel this great pressure coming down on me, it " crushing me". The system taught him to want, but everything that the father wanted was to be free. Seeing his father suffer, Igby decided to get out of the game. Consequently he rebels against every cornerstone of the American Dream. Firstly he does not use the great political experiment to finish school properly, secondly he does not want to go to university and start a great career like his brother and go on the highway of success and get motivated by everybody who fails and lies on the shoulder of the road.
And finally Igby does not believe in the existence of God, but he pities that fact, because if there was one, God should have killed his mother before Igby and his brother did. As one can see he has a strong will to get out of the American Dream, because he does not want to be crushed at the end.
