American Dream In The Great Gatsby And A Raisin In The Sun

A fire burns in all of us. A fiery passion to achieve the American Dream. This fire is not innocent, however. As we strive to stoke the fire to ever greater heights, the things we use as fuel - friends, family, people we may not even know - are burned away, turned into nothing but ashes. As Fitzgerald in his novel The Great Gatsby, Tennessee Williams in the play The Glass Menagerie, Langston Hughes in the poem Harlem, and Lorraine Hansberry in the play A Raisin in the Sun argue, the American Dream - which smolder inside all of us - is essentially evil, impossible to attain without sacrificing the dreams of others, and is, in some ways, not truly attainable.
The main characters in all these pieces strive to achieve their American Dream. Gatsby’s
Fitzgerald in his novel The Great Gatsby, Tennessee Williams in the play The Glass Menagerie, Langston Hughes in the poem Harlem, and Lorraine Hansberry in the play A Raisin in the Sun all argue - in some way or another - that the American Dream is impure, and in fact, even evil and sinful. In the novels and the plays, many times the Dream is also sinful and evil. Gatsby, for example, wishes for Daisy to leave her marriage with Tom and run away with Gatsby, asking her to commit adultery in the process and abandon her newborn child - clearly a sinful desire. Walter, too, has a sinful Dream. He wishes to open a Liquor store and sell alcohol, which, to many people and religions - even his mother - is a sinful wish. Beneatha has a sinful Dream, as she denies the existence of god, which, at the time, was certainly sinful and evil. Tom Wingfield also harbors a Dream driven by evil rather than goodness. He wishes to travel the world, but does so at the expense of his mother and sister’s lives - and their futures. In Harlem, the American Dream is not pure: it changes state and is even unstable - it has the potential to explode. It changes from state to state, drying up, festering, stinking, crusting over, changing form from what it once was. A pure substance does not do this; a pure substance stays in the same form, even after long periods of time, and only changes when other outside elements interact with it. In this way, the dream in Harlem - the American Dream - can not be pure, as it changes - both physically and chemically - as time passes, and the Dream held by the protagonists of our literature is not pure either, motivated by sinful desire rather than purity and