I Hear America Sing: The American Dream Myth

People have come to this country for adventure, opportunity, freedom, and the chance to experience the qualities of the American Dream. The American Dream is a life of personal happiness and material comfort as traditionally found out by individuals in the United States. The American Dream shows the unique promise America has given its residents and immigrants for years. Although Walt Whitman states that the American Dream is truly plausible. In truth, authors F. Scott Fitzgerald and Barbara Ehrenreich strongly believe that the American Dream is surly just a myth. Many people have opposed to thinking that the American Dream is a myth. Opposers have come to believe that not only is it not a myth, it is truly plausible. In Whitman’s poem I Hear America Sing, he claims the American Dream is plausible. “Delicious sining of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,” he writes, “Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs” (Whitman, 36). Whitman is saying that the workers are proclaiming their identity and being the strength and voice of America.

However, people have come to believe that the American Dream just isn’t possible.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, The Great Gatsby, it talks about a man, Jay Gatsby who is trying to accomplish his American Dream by winning over his love of his life, Daisy Buchanan. Fitzgerald wrote, “But he didn’t despise himself and it didn’t turn out as he had imagined. He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go---but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail. He knew that Daisy was extraordinary but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby---nothing” (Fitzgerald, 128-129). Gatsby tried very hard for years to get his American Dream, but over all he wasn’t able to. In another piece Fitzgerald wrote called Winters Dream is about a man, Dexter, who is deeply in love with a women named Judy Jones. HJe becomes very wealthy and wants to marry her bus wasn’t able to. The author reveals, “He has thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulnerable at last---but he knew that he had just lost something more, as surely as not marrying Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes. The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him” (Fitzgerald, 761). Dexter learned later on that Judy had lost her beauty and he had lost Judy.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s story Nickel and Dimed talks about a women’s struggle of being a maid.
The obstacle's she faces aren’t easy such as being sick and not getting the day off, having to cater to the owners needs, and not being able to feel her back for being on her knees scrubbing the floors. “Do the owners have any ides of the misery that goes into rendering their homes motel-perfect? would they be bothered if they did know, or would they take a sadistic pride in what they have purchased---boasting to dinner guests, for example that their floors are cleaned only with the purest of fresh human tears?” writes Ehrenreich (Ehrenreich, 76). The American Dream for this women wasn’t possible because the fact that she has to be a beg and call for someone until she’s able to find a good decent
job.

Do we really believe that there is such thing as an American Dream? In reality there isn’t. This country may be an opportunity at freedom and adventure but the qualities of the American Dream aren’t there. As proposed by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Barbara Ehrenreich we may try to achieve the American Dream but we will never accomplish the “American Dream” no matter how hard we try.