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Analysis Of Lorraine Hansberry 's ' A Raisin Of The Sun '

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“A Raisin in the Sun” is play written by Lorraine Hansberry about a struggling African American family. Set in the nineteen-fifties, the play explores the dynamics of how the family operates in a time era Chicago that challenges the family with poor economic status and racial prejudice. Hansberry uses dreams as one of her main themes in this play. Three of the characters, Walter, Beneatha, and Mama, all have a similar goal in their respective dreams, to improve the life of the whole family, but have different ideas on how it should be executed with the insurance money they obtain. With these slight differences, Hansberry uses her dream theme to display how their individual dreams ultimately require sacrifice and a submission to reality …show more content…

Walter’s unwise decision making leads to the demise of his own dream and difficulty on everyone else’s dream. If Walter thought his dream out and saw the reality of his challenges he could have made a wiser decision potentially realizing the challenges in his plan such as the man stealing his money, being an African American man in racially tense setting against him, the multiple hardships that come with owning business, and the reality that all of these things would work against his dream. Walter could have also accomplished helping his family by supporting their desires rather than making their dreams drastically more challenging. This situation drastically affects Beneatha, referred to as Bennie throughout the play, and her aspirations. Bennie fanaticizes the idea of becoming a physician to assist people through their struggles and to become something more than what she is currently. This dream is fueled by defining childhood moment where she sees her friend hurt and doctors cured his injuries “I remember… thinking that was the end of Rufus… They fixed the broken bones and they sewed it all up… I never got over that” (Hansberry 1834). Bennie elaborates after this and explains what this meant to her by saying “That that was what one person could do for another, fix him up… That was the most marvelous thing in the world… This was truly being God” (Hansberry 1834). This experience

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