American Pastoral by Philip Roth Essay

Many people have come to America for adventure, opportunity, freedom, and the chance to experience the particular qualities of the American landscape. The American Dream is the idea that every United States citizen, including immigrants and residents, should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative. America somewhat provides access to the American dream, it is more so the citizen who provides access to the dream for themselves. Even though they encountered many trials and tribulations, with persistence, people such as Langston Hughes in “I Too Sing America and Anzia Yezierska in “America and I” they were able to achieve their individual American Dream.

These “newcomers” did not deserve to come here and steal their jobs. Mike Trudic’s account from his childhood referred to his father’s hunt in America to desperately find work, “At the end of a week he was taken ill and died. It said he died of a broken heart”(Mike, 188). There were just too many workers and not enough jobs to be filled. Another first hand source provided by Rose Cohen, called Out of the Shadow, depicts the story of a jewish girl in New York and the experiences her family goes through in order to reach a sustainable lifestyle. The struggles included descriptions of harsh working conditions and anti-semitism, which created difficulty for immigrants who were trying to assimilate into the American culture.

Regardless of the person, everyone has an idea of what the “American Dream” is. Whether it be success, or something more, the connotations held with that phrase almost always symbolize an ideal, a goal. Truman Capote contrasts this idea in his novel In Cold Blood by detailing the lives of those who were involved in the Clutter murders in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote utilizes his novel to illustrate to [specific readers] that the idealistic American Dream varies from individual to individual, yet it is one of the most elusive goals of all.

Poetry is considered to be a representational text in which one explores ideas by using symbols. Poetry can be interpreted many different ways and is even harder to interpret when the original author has come and gone. Poetry is an incredible form of literature because the way it has the ability to use the reader as part of its own power. In other words, poetry uses the feelings and past experiences of the reader to interpret things differently from one to another, sometimes not even by choice of the author. Two famous poets come to mind to anybody who has ever been in an English class, Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings. Both of these poets have had numerous famous pieces due to the fact that they both

The American dream is an ideal that every immigrant strives to attain. It's the promise of wealth, security, and a future for one's family. The pursuit of this dream isn't always why people come to America; some people come because they are fleeing danger or poverty in their home country. The U.S, with it's tempting opportunity and freedom, then becomes the best place to escape to. These people leave everything behind to travel abroad and start a new, more opportune life. They risk their lives when they make the often perilous journey to America and, upon arrival, face struggles that they've never even heard of. Struggles such as cultural assimilation, discrimination, and identity. In the book The Gangster We Are All Looking For, by Le Thi Diem Thuy, a Vietnamese refugee recalls her experience as a young girl when she first arrived in the U.S. In it she tells of various struggles her and her parents, her dad is called Ba and her mom is called Ma, had while living in America. The Vietnamese girl's name is never told in the book, so she will be

Many of famous figures in our society’s past have spoken their minds about the American Dream, for each and every one of those minds, are a different response. J. G. Ballard once spoke of his American Dream, “The American Dream had run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.” The outlook on this dream has changed over the years it has existed, most societies nowadays look onto this as a “curse” or something worse. This dream now is speculated as hurting our home, America. As Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men, the grave story of the American Dream was revealed by main characters, George, Lennie, and Candy. These main characters give us an inside look into what they think the American Dream is.

The definition of the American Dream varies from person to person, however, its basic components include a healthy, happy family, a sense of safety and security, and a sufficient amount of money. People from all backgrounds strive to achieve their specific American Dream, however, actually achieving this proves extremely difficult since the nature of the American Dream is often unrealistic, fragile, or elusive. Many artists, authors, and poets use their art to explore or comment on this heavy, complex topic. Specifically, Truman Capote investigates the American Dream through his work of creative nonfiction, In Cold Blood, which centers on the violent murder of a Kansas family in the 1950’s. After interviewing law enforcement officers,

The American Dream is often one of the most well-known benefits of living in America. It is the push factor that has driven millions of foreigners to flock to the so-called land of opportunity. Originally, the American Dream was established by a clause in the Declaration of Independence. It reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (Declaration of Independence par. 2). The original American Dream, as laid out by the founding fathers, was freedom from religious persecution and the right to live a happy life. That simple idea has undergone a significant metamorphosis and now the American Dream is much more complex. It has turned into a deep avaricious dream. This transformation has been noted in contemporary literature, especially in the novels Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. These pieces of literature can be read as a larger commentary on the mutation of the American Dream and how it is now more of a negative desire for greed and material. Both Fitzgerald and Alexie surmise that the American Dream has been twisted and corrupted into an uncontrolled desire that has become unattainable for many and that the pursuit of the dream has become dangerous.

Behind the ideology of every person “proud to be an American” lies the major tenets of the quintessential American dream. The America seen today is not the same as it was 50 years prior, so how can one expect the central “dream” to be the same? In fact, each person has developed an opinion on what the American dream may mean for him/her. For one, the dream may still be the white picket fence still life from so many years ago, but for another, it may be the accumulation of riches and fame. In Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, he shows us that Chris McCandless cared not for the quotidian rat-race that he had grown so accustomed to, but more about the intricacies that the natural world had to offer. I believe that although Chris McCandless may

The American Dream has long been thought the pinnacle idea of American society. The idea that anyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, or financial status, could rise from the depths and become anything they wanted to be with no more than hard work and determination has attracted people from all around the world. Two writers from America’s past, however, have a different opinion on the once-great American Dream. F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck have given the public their beliefs on the modern Dream through the novels they have written, The Great Gatsby, and Of Mice and Men, respectively. One novel placed during the Great Depression and the other during the Roaring Twenties both illustrate how their author feels about the Dream

All things pass, and it seems the American Dream, this image of the United States being a land of opportunity, is slowly fading away as well. Those roads of gold have corroded and Lady Liberty’s torch is flickering. But maybe I’m wrong, and this inner pessimism has gotten the better of me. Maybe the American Dream is alive and well? We’ve elected a billionaire deemed a bigot and a misogynist as our next president. Our unsustainable social security system is on a path to extinction, and social mobility has come to a screeching halt. Oh how this land of opportunity has opened so many possibilities for the collapse of our nation. As Ehrenreich will demonstrate, the great social mobility associated with the American Dream is a correlation that no longer proves to be true. And though Swift’s discussion in “A Modest Proposal,” deals with the plight that plagues the nation of Ireland, it highlights the point that the common people are suffering with no voice to express their struggles, but rather only with the authorities to remedy the pain that they themselves do not experience, something the American public is dealing with as well, since our voices do not seem to be heard at times as well. This is only one of only the many reasons why the American Dream is faltering, and these readings are all pointing to the American Dream being a façade now, a nice veil to hide the harsh reality that America is facing today.

The concept of the American dream has been related to everything from religious freedom to a nice home in the suburbs. It has inspired both deep satisfaction and disillusioned fury. The phrase elicits for most Americans a country where good things can happen. However, for many Americans, the dream is simply unattainable. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams,” Dexter Green, a hardworking young man born into the middle class, becomes wrapped up in his pursuit to obtain wealth and status in his life. These thoughts and ideas represent Dexter’s fixation on his “winter dreams,” or, the idea of what the American Dream means to him: gaining enough wealth to eventually move up in social class and become somebody, someday. As Dexter attempts

century. Most Americans recognize his name, the titles of and lines from his best-known poems, and even his face. Given his immense popularity, it is a remarkable testimony to the extent of his achievement that he is also considered to be one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, of modern American poets. "…the life and work of America's premier poet- the only truly national poet America has yet produced"(Parini23). His influence is still being felt in American life today. His success in America as well as in England has guaranteed the preservation of his legacy for generations to come. "…Frost gradually evolved from poet to cultural icon,

In David Mamet’s play, “Glengarry Glen Ross”, a group of sales representatives, Shelly Levene, Richard Roma, Dave Moss, and George Aaronow, are placed into a competition that sets all of them against each other. Their bosses challenge the four men to compete against one another in a sales competition where the winner with the most sales will receive a brand new Cadillac and the two people with the least sales will lose their job. With the ultimatum of losing their job, the men struggle to out due each other in hopes that they will come out on top (Mamet 21). Through dialogue and tone, Mamet presents the characters with a sense of desperation and determination; thus, he propels the story into countless affairs of deception and cheating, and

It is not so much that Philip Roth disagrees with the concept of the American dream; he simply does not wish to buy into the myth of it all. In American Pastoral Roth laments the loss of innocence, as exemplified by both Seymour Levov, the protagonist, and Nathan Zuckerman, the narrator. Both grew up in an idyllic Jewish Newark neighborhood, both being the sons of Jewish parents. The separation of their commonality came at a young age, when Zuckerman began to idolize the golden boy of the neighborhood – Seymour “Swede” Levov, born blond haired and blue eyed, and representing everything that a young, Jewish boy would want in a local hero. It is through the narrator’s eyes that we see both the rise and fall of a Jewish family in America,