The American Dream: Theater Of The Absurd And Existentialism

are ideals used to define the American Dream. The American Dream promises immigrants and citizens a chance to pursue a better life, which is portrayed throughout the novel Behold the Dreamers . Behold the Dreamers , by Imbolo Mbue, follows the lives of Jende and Neni Jonga, an immigrant couple from Cameroon, who live in Harlem in hopes of providing a better life for their family. Throughout the Jonga’s journey, Imbolo Mbue proves that the essentials of hard work, education, and strong families are not enough for achieving the American Dream. Jende and Neni came to America in hopes of a brighter future for their family, but come to face with reality and are forced to make an impossible choice.

In a country that is based around the idea that you can be anyone and do anything, one would think that most Americans all want the typical “American Dream.” Many would agree that when we think American Dream, we think fancy yachts, designer clothing, and big buildings, but is that really what the dream is all about? By definition, the American Dream is defined as, “the idea that every U.S. citizen should have equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work and determination” (“American Dream”). It is the idea that someone that comes from the very bottom can make their way to the top through determination and persistence. But what is considered to be “the top” is hard to

My English Literature major has helped me to achieve an outstanding level of appreciation, enjoyment, and knowledge of both American and British Literature. As a high school AP English student, I struggled through great works like Hamlet and To the Lighthouse. My teacher’s daily lectures (there was no such thing as class discussion) taught me merely to interpret the works as critics had in the past. I did not enjoy the reading or writing process. As a freshman at Loras, I was enrolled in the Critical Writing: Poetry class. For the first time since grade school, my writing ability was praised and the sharing of my ideas was encouraged by an enthusiastic and nurturing professor. Despite the difficulty of poetry, I enjoyed reading it.

In the decades after the WWI there was this concept of the ‘American Dream’ that most people tried to achieve; having a career, owning your own home, and having a lot of money. The social norms consisted of a family with two parents and a child. Moreover, the father had to be the breadwinner and the mother was a stay-at-home mom. Because of the concept of the ‘American Dream’ both Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee’s plays criticize the American ideals about relationships and family life.

In more specific terms, or an obvious reason why the American Dream symbolization is overlooked, can be correlated to the initial writings of Cannery Row. Right from the gecko of the book, the preface is marked like the inside walls of Hannibal Lector’s rotting San Francisco jail cell, from the constant use of juxtaposition. This literacy metaphor floods through the first pages of the book stacking the building blocks of the town, characters, general vibes, and what the overall everything constitutes to each other in the town. Everything is compared in drastic terms, unraveling a sense of unease, anguish, remorse, and a general discomfort; the divide amongst Cannery Row’s citizens how ever is equally not dismissed. “Whore, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” are compared to “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and if that were not enough, Steinbeck delves into the financial divide between superintendents

The American Dream is not uniquely American, it is a dream held by people all around the world. It is a dream about success, a word that has different meanings for many people. The play, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry explores the American dream and race through the lense of a poor black family that receives a ten thousand dollar life insurance check after the death of the patriarch of the family. Walter Lee Younger, the adult male in the house wants to invent it in a liquor store while Walter’s mother believes that decision would be unchristian. Another view of the American dream in presented in the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a 1920’s American novel in which a wealthy man, Gatsby, attempts to woo his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. I define the American dream as earning the respect and admiration of one’s peers. Using my definition of the American dream, Walter is successful because he earns the respect of his family by refusing money to keep his dignity, whereas Gatsby does not achieve the dream because of the place and time in which he must climb the social ladder.

On order to effectively analyze “The Writer,” one might look to the Advanced Placement format, for instance, to best understand the meaning of Wilbur’s poem.

The decay of the American Dream is a result of the 1920 era of exceptional prosperity and excess material. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays the American Dream of originally being about discovery of one’s self and obtaining happiness. Fitzgerald then proves the 1920s is filled with cynicism, selfishness and meaningless pursuit of money and pleasure in association to the American Dream. In result, the disintegration of the American Dream is fostered from the desire for wealth and money, the decay of social and moral values, and the attempt to recreate the past.

For many years, many people have thrown around the term the American Dream. The American Dream can be defined as the perfect life. By achieving this dream, it can be said that an individual has it all. However, for a majority of people, achieving the American Dream is one of the hardest things in life. For some, it seems impossible to achieve. This was very relevant in the time period known as the Roaring 20’s (1920s-1930s). An author that emerges from this time is a man named F. Scoot Fitzgerald. His main thought on this idea was that it was a very complex thing. LuElla Putnam states in her article, “American Dream”, that, “The Great Gatsby depicts the lure of the American Dream as being a destructive force rather than a beneficial one” (Putnam para. 4). In his writings, he likes to compare and contrast the different lifestyles of people trying to accomplish this goal by using their backgrounds, setting the stage, and the interactions between people. F. Scott Fitzgerald shows in The Great Gatsby

The American Dream is an idea which usually includes something along the lines of anyone who does things right can be successful in America if they work hard enough regardless of their race, class, gender, or nationality. The only problem is that the American Dream does not account for issues in America like systematic racism, xenophobia, etc.; giving people a false sense of hope, or a misconstrued one. In addition, the issues presented were strongly visible during the 1920-1940’s eras; to find them one only has to look at the various issues going on at that time. The authors, John Steinbeck and Scott Fitzgerald offer the same negative point of view of the American Dream, as they both display through their characters the different ways in which it is unachievable or fictitious.

The American Dream can be understood by many people to mean many different things. Even with various meanings, to the greater part of people, it is to be happy, wealthy and successful in life; however money does not always led to happiness. You can always buy things that satisfy your want, when you have large amount of money. This stuff will make you happy for a short amount of time, but after the consumer may become uninterested with having everything he/she could possibly ever want. This is just one of the ways the characters in the novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald are by the deceptive representation of the American Dream. The accurate meaning of the American Dream is missing from the characters like Jay Gatsby, Tom Buchanans, Myrtle Wilson, and Daisy Buchanans in the novel, and leads them to the disgrace of their life to acquire its illusionary purpose.

“Traditionally, Americans have sought to realize the American dream of success, fame and wealth through thrift and hard work” (Warshauer). Everyone has a dream about how they can make their life better. The American Dream is an idea that has driven people to try to achieve their goal but today that means finding a loophole to get it done. James Truslow Adams defined it as “That a dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” Adams wrote this with an open mind about the American people. He believed that with a specific goal and perseverance the people have the ability to reach the goal. He wrote this in 1931 and the American dream is still effective today but looked at in a different way. The ideas of the American Dream have shifted and evolved, as time goes on but the framework has been tweaked as people became greedy and lazy. F. Scott Fitzgerald generates characters to focus on the corruption of the American dream and the breakdown of people’s morality.

Each character in the novel has their own interpretation of the ‘American Dream – the pursuit of happiness’ as they all lack happiness due to the

The first example of the American Dream causing problems is with the characters, Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. Jay Gatsby is trying to recreate or relive his past with Daisy, but she’s moved on with her life. The following autumn after Gatsby had left for war, and Daisy had ended things with him, Daisy seemed very happy. “In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before” (Fitzgerald 75) Daisy had moved on from Jay Gatsby in one of the most obvious ways, which was by marrying a different man. “He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then..” (Fitzgerald 110). This quote refers back to Nick’s thoughts about Gatsby still wanting to be with Daisy, since in a way, she took something of him.

Our understanding of Edward Albee's achievement in The American Dream (1960) has come a long way since 1961 when Martin Esslin hailed it as a "brilliant first example of an American contribution to the Theatre of the Absurd"1 and 1966 when Nicholas Canaday, Jr. labeled it America's "best example of what has come to be known as 'the theatre of the absurd.'"2