The Strength of Family in Death of a Salesman and A Raisin in the Sun

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

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.

Every respectable parent wants what is best for their children, even if that means putting their personal dreams on hold. Unfortunately, parents can negatively affect their children through, not only their actions, but also their beliefs onto how to achieve their dreams. The damaging effects of parents chasing unrealistic dreams, such as the American Dream, can be seen through their children and how they chase their own dreams. Biff Loman of Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller and Walter Younger of A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry watch their parents fight for their dreams only to become a failure, Biff is pulled into his father’s delusional dreams of success and Walter lacks the proper role models to shape his dreams around,

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.

Since the beginning of its time, America has set a global standard for offering chances at prosperity and career opportunities for qualified adults. Its people have been implicating the idea of the “American Dream” into its culture for many years and has become widely recognized by individuals all across the world. People pack up their lives and families to travel to American soil to try at a chance of a better life, and in doing so, they too venture on a path to achieving this so commonly understood “American Dream.” Arthur Miller, a well-known literary writer in America, seems to disagree with this national phenomena, offering a different view in his play Death of a Salesman. In this play, he demonstrates through the life of an average

Compare and contrast the ways in which the American Dream is presented through Walter Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s ‘ A Raisin in the Sun’ and Willy Lehman in Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of the Salesman’

“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

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

    The American Dream, although different for each of us, is what we all aspire to achieve. In Lorraine Hansberry's, play, A Raisin in the Sun, each member of the Younger family desperately hopes for their own opportunity to achieve the American Dream. The American Dream to the Younger family is to own a home, but beyond that, to Walter Younger, it is to be accepted by white society.

Family is important to live a happy, healthy life. A poor, black family, the Youngers, live together in a small house in Chicago in the 1950s. Their main focus is not getting money, but staying together and loving each other. Lena, Walter's mother, is the head of the family and live out the moral of the importance of family. Throughout A Raisin in the Sun, Lena attempts to bring her plant back to life, which can be a symbol of the family struggling.

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.

At most times, the American Dream resembles an ideological puzzle more than a fully realizable image. Within the confines of her fantastical, theatrical world Lorraine Hansberry attempts to fit a few of these pieces together and, in the process, ends up showing exactly how everything doesn't just snap-together all nicely. The problems in her play, A Raisin In The Sun, deal primarily with the basic nature of humans and their respected struggle's to "make it" in America.

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

America has long been known as the land of opportunity and the idea of the American Dream is rather appealing to most. Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, addresses the ongoing conflicts within one family. However, he also uses the play to offer an indictment on the American capitalist system, and in it he exposes the potentially harmful and destructive myth built around the American Dream and the struggles to obtain it.