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What is your understanding of the American dream and how does Steinbeck show the dream will never be realised
“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. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."
The American dream was written by a man called James Truslow Adams in his book “The Epic of America” written in 1931. this dream followed after the wall street crash when banks lost people’s money and the people were left penniless, it also followed after the great dustbowls where tornadoes blew away the soil and people were left starved because they couldn’t grow food and had to migrate to California. At this time people were also crazy about Hollywood and everyone wanted to be in the “pitchers”!
And also many people with mental disabilities or black people were discriminated because of what they were and it was a hard time for them.
If we want to know Steinbeck’s view of the American dream a big clue is in the name of the book “of mice and men” this relates to a poem once about a field mouse that spends all year getting his food stocks ready for winter and then a big combine harvester comes along and destroys everything. The poem goes “The best laid schemes of mice and men aft gang agley” which means “the best laid schemes of mice and men often go astray”
This is already suggesting that the plans in the book or the dreams or even the American dream will never be realised and will always go wrong no matter how well it’s planned out. This also shows Steinbeck’s pessimistic view to life.
He also shows this in many ways like how in the book everyone is lonely and even the place where they are “Soledad” which actually means “loneliness” in Spanish and how there is so much discrimination in the book against characters which makes you think that Steinbeck probably always thought that that was the nature of humans and how it can never be changed. We see lots of status and power and people bullying others, and just basically the bad times they lived in.
Nature of human existence:
1. People will always discriminate others
Whether because of what colour they are, if they have mental disabilities, and even women. This is shown in characters like Lennie who is made fun of by even people like George just because he has mental disabilities. (Like in the bit where George tells slim how he once told Lennie to jump in a lake and how Lennie nearly drowned). Colour discrimination can be [next page]