A Raisin The Sun And Willy Loman Compare And Contrast Essay

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman offers a distinct commentary on the American Dream, best explored in the death of its protagonist, Willy Loman. Almost immediately before Willy and his wife Laura are to make their final payment on their twenty-five year mortgage and take full ownership of their house, Willy, crazed and desperate, commits suicide. As his family mourns and praises him, Willy’s eldest son, Biff, bemoans, “He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong…He never knew who he was” (Miller 111). This occurrence sheds light on the truth Miller hoped to convey: The American Dream – what should be equated with home, family, and happiness – may all too often be corrupted into something much more superficial. It may be warped into the

People from all around the world have dreamed of coming to America and building a successful life for themselves. The "American Dream" is the idea that, through hard work and perseverance, the sky is the limit in terms of financial success and a reliable future. While everyone has a different interpretation of the "American Dream," some people use it as an excuse to justify their own greed and selfish desires. Two respected works of modern American literature, The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman, give us insight into how the individual interpretation and pursuit of the "American Dream" can produce tragic

The American Dream, the idea that anybody can be successful through hard work and dedication, has been a driving force in the American history. However, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby and Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun express the notion that the Dream itself is defined differently to different people. The American Dream is not the same for everybody, it is instead an idealistic achievement that changes based on who is driving themselves towards the Dream. Success through the Dream, therefore, is defined by the Dreamers themselves. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby achieves materialistic wealth, but that wealth is not enough to fulfill his definition of the Dream. Gatsby’s idea of success is to gain respect from others and to receive love back from the women he loves - Daisy. A Raisin in the Sun’s Walter Younger, on the other hand, desires wealth, and struggles utilizing the Dream’s ideals to attain said wealth. His definition of success revolves around a stable income that would allow him and his family a comfortable lifestyle where money is not as big an issue. Both Gatsby and Walter’s experiences and the polar differences in their Dream’s definitions reveals that the success of one’s Dream is based heavily on the person themselves and not measurable by tangible aspects such as wealth or respect.

The story ‘Death of a Salesman’ written by Miller focuses on a man doing all he can to allow him and his family to live the American dream. Throughout the story it is shown how the Loman’s struggle with finding happiness and also with becoming successful. Throughout their entire lives many problems come their way resulting in a devastating death caused by foolishness and the drive to be successful. Ever since he and his wife, Linda, met she has been living a sad and miserable life, because she has been trying support his unachievable goals. Also by him being naïve put his children’s lives in jeopardy and also made them lose sight of who they really were. Miller uses the Loman family to show how feeling the need to appear a certain way to the public and trying to live a life that is not really yours can turn into an American nightmare.

One of the main things that the two characters have in common is that their dreams have been skewed by what they hope to achieve. Willy had hoped to have become a great salesman one day, but was too focused on his likability to have gotten far. On page eighteen, Willy tells Biff, “Someday I’ll have my own business, and I’ll never have to leave home any more” (Miller 18). This quote shows that Willy had dreamt of becoming wealthy and successful by owning disown selling business, but instead, he stayed in the same job for over thirty years. Biff then likens his father’s dreams to Charlie, a family friend, and the position he holds. Willy

“May I never wake up from the American dream.” Carrie Latet describes the most sought after dream: the dream of a house surrounded by a white picket fence, the dream people work their entire lives for, the dream people fight wars for: the American dream. However, America’s rise to industrialism in the 19th and 20th centuries replaced this dream with the desire to get rich fast. This change led people to believe that it is possible, common even, to obtain wealth rapidly; yet this is not the case. Sometimes, when an individual is unable to acquire such extreme wealth, he create a sense of false reality for himself, his common sense is blurred, and he sees opportunities where there are none. Characters Walter Lee Younger and Willy Loman are

When a person thinks of the American dream they think of wealth, financial stability, and a centered household, but they often do not think of what level of self-interest one must have in order to succeed. When people form upper class families have certain privileges that others do not they are not considered to be selfish. Furthermore when people that have lower class budgets get the opportunity to be privileged they are both trying to fulfill a personal centered objective but are also stopped by other people's success and selfishness. This is the controversy that has framed the United States today. The American dream has separated the fortunate and the less fortunate and has blurred the lines of societies standards of being selfish. The play A Raisin in the Sun exemplifies this controversy as the characters with their own selfish needs but we have to ask, are they really selfish if the higher people in society are doing the exact same thing? The play also shows that everyone is trying to achieve the American dream, and for that people have to be focused and accumulated more towards their self needs.

In the playwright A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry is about a poor African-American family named the Younger. This family live in a poor one bedroom apartment in the Southside of Chicago. In the play this family suffer and struggle a lot and they were always praying and wish to live in a very big house of their own. In the beginning of the play this family knows that they going to get Walter Lee Sr insurance worth 10,000 dollars that he left behind after his death for Lena ( mama). In the play this family was waiting on the check so that they share it to themselves. In the playwright Walter Lee wants to open his own type of business which is liquor store, in the other hand Lena ( mama) has always wanted to buy a big nice house with a backyard where her grandson Travis can been playing everyday. The three characters that are in the playwright are Walter Lee Younger Junior, Lena Younger (mama), and Ruth Younger this are three characters.

The struggle for financial security and success has always been prominent in the American culture. The idea of the American dream captures the hearts of so many, yet leaves almost all of them enslaved in the endless economic struggle to achieve high status, wealth, and a house with a white picket fence. In Arthur Miller's, Death of a Salesman, we see how difficult it is for Willy Loman and his sons to achieve this so called American dream. In Lorraine Hansberry's, A Raisin in the Sun, she examines an African-American family's struggle to break out of the poverty that is preventing them from achieving some sort of financial stability, or in other words the American dream. Both plays explore the desire for wealth, driving forces that

also share some misconceptions about the relationship of their manhood with success. Willy states early in Death of a Salesman that he feels “kind of temporary” about his manhood because his father left him in his childhood (Miller 1078). He is obsessed with a romantic story that he tells himself about his father and brother, conflating the honor of authentic manliness with a heroic ideal. Willy then instills an assumption in his sons that manliness and charisma are excuses for lies and theft. The Lomans do not realize that there is no substitute for honesty and industriousness. Walter Jr. is also motivated to be the leader and provider for his family. However, he does not understand that his risky pursuit of wealth is endangering what his family truly needs. Once he realizes that the small gain of a home would give his family hope, he becomes willing to labor for small hopes instead of focusing on large risks. Walter Jr. is both proud of the work of generations before him and willing to combat the racism of their new neighborhood. He respects the humble dreams of his ancestors and realizes how hard they worked for the life that he found unsatisfactory. When Walter Jr. finally “comes into his manhood,” his mother finds faith in his leadership and allows him to make decisions for the family (Hansberry 1238). Unfortunately, Willy never achieves true manhood in his pursuit of his

In history there have been an uncountable amount of plays made, but there have only been two that fully captured the American dream like A Raisin in the sun and Death of a Salesman. In both plays the protagonist is trying to achieve the American dream, but it is near impossible when neither of them has the respect of their superiors or the people around them. It is amazing that two different plays can so closely parallel each other when they have a time gap of over 10 years.

‘A Raisin in the Sun’, by Lorraine Hansberry, is a playwright that briefs on the arduous life of the Youngers, an African-American family that is enduring the financial and cultural troubles that many like them faced in the era before the Civil Rights movement. However, it also details their journey to realizing their own dreams, and the great strength it takes to acquire those aspirations. One of the major characters, who at first is not as admirable for his wrong deeds, is Walter Lee Younger. Walter is an arrogant character and his desire of wanting to pursue his dreams of investing in a liquor store, cultivates Walter into a savage. Despite his initial attitude, Walter’s actions of realizing his remorse of giving away his family’s money, going through his bout of desperation, and coming to the fact that his family’s dreams and his own dignity is greater than monetary value transforms

Published in 1949, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is a tragic commentary on the hollowness and futility of the American Dream. This paper will explore Willy’s obsession with achieving material wealth and prosperity and how his yearning for the American Dream ultimately caused him to deny reality and lead the breakup of his family. Ultimately, Miller’s message is not that the American Dream is by necessity a harmful social construct, but simply that it has been misinterpreted and perverted to rob individuals of their autonomy and create inevitable dissatisfaction.

When he was entrusted with money from his Mama to put in the bank for his sister’s college, he went crazy and gave the money to his friend and got it taken away. When Willy’s boys were younger and in high school, he did not fight with them that much. When he grew to his age in the book, he fought with Biff a lot because Biff did not know what to do with his life. He still loved Biff, but the issue with no plan bugged him because, in Willy’s eyes, success is having a good job with some money. Walter did not seem to care about his wife, Linda, that much.

A Raisin in the Sun, written by Lorraine Hansberry, and Death of a Salesman, written by Arthur Miller, both address the American Dream. Both plays discuss the desire for wealth and how the desire may lead to one’s