ally possessing it. These materialistic values, which
he and the other characters in the novel uphold,
serve to produce a general feeling of despondency
throughout the text. By the end of the novel, this
despondency leads to despair, and the greed that
overruns the novel leads to Gatsby’s murder.
In a similar vein, Arthur Miller’s 1949 play
death oF a saLesMan is also critical of the effects
the American dream can produce in those who
believe wholeheartedly in its monetary promise
alone. Like Jay Gatsby, Willy Loman, the play’s
protagonist, is obsessed with making money. Rather
than finding a job as a physical laborer, which he
enjoys, Willy devotes his life to selling. In other
words, he devotes himself to the sole task of mak-
ing money. Throughout the play, Willy experiences
flashbacks in which he relives various incidents from
his life. He is a constant daydreamer and therefore
has a difficult time focusing on the reality of the
moment he is currently experiencing. Ultimately,
Willy’s obsession with the American dream makes
him forget that he has a family who loves him and
natural talents that he could employ. In the end,
Miller’s depiction of the quest for the American
dream is even more somber than is Fitzgerald’s:
Willy kills himself, while his son Happy decides to
follow along in his father’s footsteps, avenging what
he sees as the wrongs society enacted against Willy.
At his father’s funeral, Happy asserts: “Willy Loman
did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the
only dream you can have—to come out number-one
man” (2049). This conclusion to the play indicates
that Miller believes that what he views as the treach-
erous myth of the American dream will continually
perpetuate itself, relentlessly casting its dark shadow
on future generations of young Americans.
Yet it can easily be argued that those who feel
slighted by the promise of the American dream
the most are minority groups—those who have
been constantly disenfranchised by the American
governmental system and who have been forced
to view the hypocrisy they see as inherent within
the Dream their entire lives. In his famous 1963 “I
Have a Dream” speech, the African-American civil
rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that
his hope for the equality of all races in America was
one “deeply rooted in the American dream.” King
believed that all Americans should be provided the
opportunity to prosper to their fullest potential.
Much like King, the Harlem Renaissance poet,
Langston Hughes also lamented that minority
groups were never given the opportunity to expe-
rience the hope the American dream supposedly
provides to its nation’s citizens. In “Let America
Be America Again,” Hughes juxtaposes the image
of what privileged white Americans envision their
country to be with his own experience in the coun-
try as an African-American citizen, remarking that
“America never was America to me” (l. 5). Like-
wise, in his 1951 poem “Harlem,” Hughes asks the
question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” (l.
1), ultimately suggesting that minority groups are
denied the realization of their dreams in America.
Deciding to mimic some of Hughes’s themes,
Lorraine Hansberry adopted one of the lines
from “Harlem” as the title to her 1959 play a raisin^
in the sun. Hansberry’s play follows the lives of
the Youngers, an African-American family living
in 1950s Chicago. In the drama, Lena Younger,
the family matriarch, receives insurance money
from the death of her husband. She puts a deposit
down on a house and gives the rest of it to her
son, Walter Lee. Almost predictably, Walter Lee
quickly squanders the rest of the money on a “get
rich quick” business scheme that fails. After all, as
has been shown in many of the prior examples, a
driving theme throughout much American litera-
ture is that the pursuit of monetary gain above all
other factors almost inescapably leads to suffering.
Because Lena does at least have the chance to put
the money down for the house, the play actually
concludes on a somewhat positive note. Though the
family expects to experience racial oppression in the
white neighborhood to which they are moving, they
still decide to proceed with the move and to face
that problem together. By the play’s end, then, the
family is unified. They have all forgiven Walter, and
they have come to realize that appreciating family
relationships in the same way that Lena does should
construct the basis of a “real” American dream.
Further, in his 1993 short story collection, The
Lone ranGer and tonto FistF iGht in heaven,
the Native American writer Sherman Alexie
shows that, like African Americans, Native Ameri-American dream, the 9