1. Preliminary Chapters
1.1. Table of contents
1.
2.
3.
Preliminary Chapters ............................................................................................................. 1
1.1.
Table of contents ............................................................................................................ 1
1.2.
Introduction .................................................................................................................... 3
1.3.
Angle of approach .......................................................................................................... 4
1.4.
Choice of novels............................................................................................................. 5
1.5.
The American Dream ..................................................................................................... 7
1.5.1.
The first dream: A religious utopia ......................................................................... 8
1.5.2.
The Declaration of Independence ........................................................................... 9
1.5.3.
The dream of upwards mobility............................................................................ 11
1.5.4.
The dream of equality ........................................................................................... 14
1.5.5.
The dream of home ownership ............................................................................. 16
1.5.6.
The dream of effortless leisure ............................................................................. 18
The Great Gatsby................................................................................................................. 21
2.1.
Background .................................................................................................................. 21
2.2.
Summary ...................................................................................................................... 21
2.3.
Analysis ........................................................................................................................ 22
2.3.1.
Gatsby’s unusual love for Daisy ........................................................................... 23
2.3.2.
The Great Gatsby as mobilization fiction ............................................................. 25
2.3.3.
Nick Carraway the middle man ............................................................................ 30
2.3.4.
The Great Gatsby as a story about great, ambiguous American Dreams ............. 32
The Grapes of Wrath ........................................................................................................... 34
3.1.
Background .................................................................................................................. 34
1
4.
3.2.
Summary ...................................................................................................................... 35
3.3.
Analysis ........................................................................................................................ 36
3.3.1.
Religious symbolism and reaffirmation ................................................................ 36
3.3.2.
Jefferson, the Joads and a new frontier ................................................................. 39
3.3.3.
The price of American individualism ................................................................... 40
3.3.4.
The dark side to Steinbeck’s vision ...................................................................... 41
On the Road ......................................................................................................................... 43
4.1.
Background .................................................................................................................. 43
4.2.
Summary ...................................................................................................................... 44
4.3.
Analysis ........................................................................................................................ 45
4.3.1.
The white negro and dreaming of Dean ............................................................... 46
4.3.2.
The road as the new frontier ................................................................................. 48
4.3.3.
Back and forth between individual and society .................................................... 50
5.
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 53
6.
References ........................................................................................................................... 57
2
1.2. Introduction
”I've never been to America
and it’s time that I learned the truth, the truth
I've just heard of a rumour
your culture spreads and then it pollutes
Please try not to take it personal
I'm only going on the blatant truth”
With these lines opens the song “You’re Turning Into John Wayne”, by Scottish alternative
rock band Twin Atlantic. It is a song that goes on to summon the listener’s awareness to the ongoing influence American culture is having on the rest of the world. Ask any person in the street
directly: If they give it some thought, few of them are likely to deny that a large part of the cultural
phenomena that surrounds them in their everyday lives is either imported directed from the United
States or heavily influenced by ideas originating there. In a recent issue of British music magazine
“Rock Sound”, an article compiled the top 115 albums of the past ten years, interestingly noting that
over 70% of them were from America. Moreover, if you go to the cinema one evening to watch a
movie, how many of the options available are products of Hollywood film industry? How many of
the shows you watch on television in your own country are either bought from American networks
or directly copied according to an American formula? In Denmark we have had our own versions of
“Paradise Hotel” and “Dancing with the Stars” and one of our most critically acclaimed comedy
shows – “Klovn” – is directly inspired by America’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.
When made aware of this influence, it is only common for most non-Americans to react
strongly against it, taking a sceptical, defensive stance like the musicians in Twin Atlantic, towards
this foreign flooding of one’s own national heritage. After all, when trying to think of things and
concepts typically American the negative impressions that come to mind are plentiful. Junk food
and obesity problems, gun happiness, presidential scandal, paparazzi culture, social inequality,
extreme nationalism, rigid conservative morals and old-fashioned religiousness – These are just
some of the negative stereotypes that one thinks of readily when asked about one associates with
America.
3
Giving it some second thought however, is it not strange that we in many ways think so poorly
of America yet allow ourselves to be as influenced and fascinated with its culture as we are? It begs
the question of whether it is not worthwhile to dig a little deeper and to try to understand better this
culture that is among the strongest and most influential in the modern world. Does it really make
sense for us to deprecate America and accuse it of shallowness, if we ourselves rely solely on
superficial impressions of it? Surely the sensible answer seems to be the contrary. How can it not be
worthwhile, getting at least a little more intimate with America, a culture of such uniqueness and
such presence in the world’s collective consciousness that it almost makes one feel silly trying to
account for its gravity.
This paper then, is an attempt to get to know the Americans a little bit better – To find out what
their culture has to offer, and how they see themselves as Americans. As a student of language and
literature one logical way to go about it is to turn to the nation’s most defining works of literary
fiction; manifestations of the so-called ‘Great American Novel’. An epithet that is bestowed only
upon novels that most accurately reflect the zeitgeist in the United States at the time of their writing,
and which means that the reading of such works means gaining familiarity with some of the very
cornerstones of the country’s cultural canon. Furthermore, to narrow the scope of the paper, focus
will rest heavily on the concept of the American Dream; a concept which even the most ignorant
towards the country’s culture, should still know as one that sits at the very centre of its ideology. As
will be elaborated on shortly, the American Dream is an idea that Americans generally identify with
and hold near the heart of their national identity, and as such investigating it should help us develop
a deeper understanding of what characterises the Americans and binds them together as a people.
1.3. Angle of approach
For this purpose, we will first lay some groundwork by exploring the idea of the American
Dream and its history. Using The American dream: a short history of an idea that shaped a nation
by Professor Jim Cullen, we will trace a number of conceptions of the American Dream throughout
different periods of Americas history, hoping to gain some necessary historical background
knowledge and an understanding of the development of the American Dream, before we go looking
for it in the selected works of fiction.
With the American Dream thus explored, we then move on to the examination of three
examples of Great American novels, as well as a survey of various analyses of them, hoping to
4
develop the richest possible comprehension of the themes of each. The chosen texts are “The Great
Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck and “On the Road” by
Jack Kerouac. As each title has been dissected many times before, and from a multitude of different
perspectives and with different agendas, we go in with a careful focus on finding out what the
stories say about the American Dream as dreamed by the characters and their authors. Discussions
of literary style will largely be overlooked in favour of interpretations of the themes of the actual
content. Simply put, we go in more interested in what makes the ideas of these novels great, more
so than in what makes the technical writing of them great. If we consider the authors as among the
foremost organs of expressing American culture and American dreams, then we weigh what they
express over the manner in which they express it.
Before we get started with any of this work however, it would be sensible to elaborate the
reasons for choosing exactly these titles ahead of others:
1.4. Choice of novels
When it came to choosing the titles to focus on in this paper, here is a list of the criteria that
went into the determination:
 The titles must be of indisputable classical status, as to allow for little doubt about whether
they really are the cornerstones of culture that we are interested in.
 The titles must be from different authors, to make sure we get different perspectives
 The time in between both the plot and the publication of each novel must be neither too
short nor too long. Firstly because we want to allow for the possibility of the ‘American
Dream’ that we observe to change over time, and secondly because we want to be able to
see this change with the least amount of gap in between our observations.
 The titles must be written by American authors, in America and they must be about events
that transpire mainly in America. The reasoning is that while expatriate authors such as
Gertrude Stein or Ernest Hemingway may have written some of the most famous works of
American literature, a book like for instance Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” describes
the experience of Americans abroad, and robs us of the opportunity to hear the author
describing the American setting and his characters’ relation to it.
5
 Given the tendency to divide American literature into periods separated by the wars the
country has been engaged in, the titles should be published and their plots should take place
closely around one of these wars, again for the purpose of allowing us to see any kind of
cultural shift taking place
 The main characters of each chosen title should preferably come from different social
layers. Again, this is to allow for us to get a diverse American experience, while also being
able to notice which observations resonate across a wider social spectrum.
As we can see, these criteria match up well against our choices:

“The Great Gatsby”
Set in 1922 in and around New York on the eastern shore. Published in 1925. Most
characters are wealthy and so is their environment. Two are veterans from World War I.

“Grapes of Wrath”
Set in the late 1930’s with the plot moving from the Midwest to California. Published in
1939. Most characters are so poor they have to leave their homes.

“On the Road”
Plot spans the years 1947 to 1950, as well as most of the country, as its characters travel the
width of the continent from New York to San Francisco, living either from pay check to
pay check or by stealing or from the charity of others. Published in 1957.
Furthermore, each of these titles obviously have a history of being spoken of among the
greatest literary achievements of America, and are frequently listed in or near the top of lists that
seek to rank the great novels not only of America, but of the world in general. Such merits should of
course only help to lend integrity to our belief that they will offer interesting perspectives,
especially on the American Dream(s) that we are interested in, considering how each is also
commonly talked about as manifestations of the Great American novel, and how each has
popularised characters that achieved canonical status as some of the great American Dreamers of
fiction.
With these selections in place, our next step is to take an in depth look at the concept of the
Great American Novel, so as to better understand and appreciate their status and value as such.
6
1.5. The American Dream
In the introduction to this paper we have wondered at American culture and recalled many of
the negative stereotypes outsiders easily associate with it, but if we were asked for a moment to
dismiss the negatives and think of any positive, inherently American concepts, then ‘The American
Dream’ would certainly be one. In fact, it might not be farfetched to call it the one, considering how
its meaning has become so common sense that, as remarked by professor in American Civilisation
Jim Cullen in his book about the subject; The American dream: a short history of an idea that
shaped a nation
“None of the books I looked at makes anything like a systematic attempt to define the term
or trace its origins; its definition is virtually taken for granted. It’s as if no one feels compelled
to fix the meanings and uses of a term everyone presumably understands – which today
appears to mean that in the United States anything is possible if you want it badly enough.”1
And furthermore that:
“The term seems like the most lofty as well as the most immediate component of an
American identity, a birthright far more meaningful and compelling than terms like
“democracy,” “Constitution,” or even “the United States.”2
From this it would seem then, that this American dream is an essential concept to consider
when trying to understand the American mind-set, and given such importance, we must wonder like
Cullen, if tracing the origin and meaning of the term is not almost obligatory if we want to have any
sort of understanding of American identity. Joining him on such an endeavour we thus want to learn
about how the American Dream has been rooted in historical reality, before we go looking for its
appearances in fiction later in the paper.
In his book Cullen makes the claim, that although we may all have an intuitive understanding
of the American Dream as a belief that all should have the liberty and opportunity to pursue
improvement and happiness in their lives, the truth is that the meaning of the dream has changed
over the years. Through the book he explores what the dream has meant to people in America
throughout the country’s history, examining its manifestations over six periods, and considering that
we are about to read and analyse books about Americans and American life, it will serve here to
1
2
Cullen, 2003, page 5
Cullen, 2003, page 5
7
briefly recount Cullen’s work, so that we have the best possible understanding of an idea that should
be an underlying theme for all things American.
1.5.1. The first dream: A religious utopia
In the first period of American history after the continent’s discovery by Europeans, many of
the first to make the new world a destination for colonization were groups of religious minorities
who were unhappy with the religious climate in their home countries. Quakers and puritans and the
likes disapproved of for instance the protestant Church of England, feeling that the majority did not
practice religion with enough discipline to properly atone for original sin. Naturally, this created
tension between them and their less zealous neighbours and quoting Cullen:
““We call you Puritans,” an English clergyman wrote in the early seventeenth century,
“not because you are purer than other men ...but because you think yourselves to be purer.”
[…]
the important point is that the Puritans not only made it difficult for the people who lived
among them; they made it impossible for anyone to live alongside them.”3
The curious thing about the Puritans and other religious minorities that decided to venture to
the new world, is that they did so not because they had nothing to lose – as Cullen remarks that
many of them “were relatively well educated people who in many cases had substantial financial
resources at their disposal,” 4 – but because they sought with burning desire a liberty to, as
contradictory as it may sound to modern minds, live in a way that was more strict, more pure. In
America these people hoped to find a peaceful, isolated environment in which they could establish a
pure, utopian society to serve as a model that could be displayed to their detractors at home,
hopefully proving that their perceived faithlessness was wrong. As open an interpretation as we
have of the word ‘freedom’ today, it is thus interesting to note that this very first freedom that any
Americans dreamed of, was not about gender, race, money, politics or sexuality. It was about
religion, and furthermore, it was about the right to practice religion – and practice it only – in a
manner that was more conservative, not more progressive:
“In fact, insofar as they did understand freedom as we do, they considered it monstrous.
“There is twofold liberty – natural (I mean as our nature is now corrupt) and civil or federal,”
3
4
Cullen, 2003, page 12
Cullen, 2003, page 17
8
Massachusetts Bay founder John Winthrop explained in 1645 “The first is common to man with
beasts and other creatures. By this, man as he stands into relation to man, hath the liberty to do
as he lists.” This kind of freedom “makes men grow more evil, and in time to be worse than
brute beasts.” True freedom, on the other hand, “is maintained and exercised in a way of
subjection to authority.” Freedom involved a willing surrender to the will of the Lord, a choice
to defer to Godly clerical and civil authorities that ruled in His name.” 5
The freedom the first Europeans-turned-Americans were after then, was a vastly
underdeveloped one seen from our modern perspective, yet Cullen suggests that it may have been
exactly because of the extreme faith these people had in their religion and in their vision of a pure
society, that they actually made the journey and laid the foundations for a society unlike any other
in the civilised world. So while the original dream of the freedom to create a disciplined religious
utopia gradually lost its singular strength for a variety of reasons, it is worth noting partly because it
is a point of origin for the dream we speak of today, and partly because it may help us understand
why we can still observe religion in a very prominent role in American society.6
1.5.2. The Declaration of Independence
Another group of Americans who gave the dream one of its most powerful manifestations were
the country’s founding fathers, who formulated words that would be identified with the dream for
posterity when they composed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, desiring for the American
colonies to secede from the British Empire. The British had fought hard conflicts against both
natives and other colonial powers trying to secure their colonies, and having incurred massive
expenses in their efforts they now saw the need to tighten their control – and more importantly their
taxation - of the people who lived there. As Cullen elaborates in his chapter on this period, this did
not sit well with the Americans, who had come to this place exactly to be left to ‘mind their own
business’. The declaration however, flipped the colonists’ resistance towards the British from being
an effort to maintain an existing lack of regulation from the empire, to being a full on revolutionary
struggle to bring about a new republic, properly independent from British rule. And while few
Americans today are likely to remember the full document by heart, there is one bit that most
remember with clarity:
5
6
Cullen, 2003, page 21
Section generally references: Cullen, 2003, page 11-34
9
“The key to the Declaration, the part that survives in collective memory and which
underwrites the American Dream, is the opening clauses of the second paragraph: “We hold
these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of
Happiness.” These words speak to us. It’s not only that they laid the foundations for sweeping
social movements like the struggle to end slavery, and thus created a recognizably modern
United States. These words actually structure the minutiae of everyday existence: where we go
to school, who we marry, what we buy. In other times and places, people have made such
decisions on the basis of the greater glory of God, the security of their nation, or obligations to
their ancestors. We usually don’t, and on those relatively rare occasions when we do, there is a
powerful perception that such decisions are atypical, even foolish.”7
This is all good and well if we read it without second thought, but when digging a little deeper
into the history it again becomes clear that these Americans of old did not mean quite the same as
we do now, when they spoke of equality and the freedom to pursue happiness. More importantly
however, they did not mean the same as tend to, when they used the word ‘men’, because here they
really were talking about males – white males – exclusively:
When the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal, the
writers of that document really did mean men, by their lights: not females, not some black or
yellow-skinned “savage,” but civilized white males (a.k.a. “men”). All those people were
created equal–an assertion notable for both its inclusiveness relative to what came before and
its exclusivity relative to what followed.8
Things look especially contradictory when we consider the fact that the Americans during the
revolution wanted to be free as opposed to living in ‘slavery’ under the rule of the British, yet the
freedom they fought for seemed to include the ‘freedom’ for white American men to be allowed to
own slaves, which several of the founding fathers – like Thomas Jefferson himself for instance –
also did.
Still, while we make note of these areas that still needed some improvement seen from our
modern perspectives, we must also notice that as a manifestation of the American dream, the
declaration shows us a development, with “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” being at the
7
8
Cullen, 2003, page 38
Cullen, 2003, page 51
10
centre now, rather than just the narrow desire for a life and a society according to strict religious
propriety. Moreover, Cullen concludes his chapter on the declaration arguing that its continuing
relevancy also stems from how its wording helped turn the American dream from a dream of
something static into a dream of movement; Firstly by helping the colonists think that rather than
preserve their relative freedom under the British they could break free and start building a new and
better kind of nation by themselves, and secondly by putting these concepts; Equality, liberty and
happiness – at the centre of the dream, allowing future generations to refine it by refining the
nation’s very understanding of these concepts.9
1.5.3. The dream of upwards mobility
With the declaration of independence thus moving the focus of the American dream away from
religion, the road was paved for the thought to undergo considerable development over the next
century of its history. Slowly, the notion of what was a good life changed from being about living in
accordance with rules or religion, to being about achieving good things and making something of
yourself. It was during the 19th century that the idea, of a man coming from nothing and going on to
achieve great things via nothing but hard work and perseverance, rose to become an American ideal.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) – one of the founding fathers – had already pioneered this attitude.
Entering indentured servitude under his brother in his youth because his father could not afford a
proper education, he would later rise to become a leading author, printer, politician and inventor
among other things. He was among the first Americans to show the world that you could become
someone based on your own merits rather than based on your heritage. Cullen makes note of several
people following in Franklin’s footsteps, such as escaped slave Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)
who fled from slavery in the south to make himself a writer and statesman in the north, and Andrew
Jackson (1767-1845), the seventh president of the United States who;
“[…] won the people’s support for a variety of reasons, but perhaps most significantly
because he embodied what was then, and what would remain long after, the American Dream.
Born poor in a near-wilderness, he had forged success largely on his own, by his strength, his
iron will, his exertions and convictions.”10
9
Section generally references: Cullen, 2003, page 35-58
Cullen, 2003, page 69
10
11
And for each such self-made man who rose to prominence, their image became an inspiring
idea in the culture of the time, with leading transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882) hence writing in his essay Self-reliance (1841):
“In the Will work and acquire, and thou has chained the wheel of chance, and shall sit
hereafter out of fear from her rotations,”11
The freedom man was born with, according to the declaration of independence, was coming to
be conceived as the freedom to better oneself and make something of one’s life, yet as this became
so essential to the perception of what the dream was, believers in these ideas soon started to worry
about the contradiction implied by the nation’s reliance on slavery. The idea of a man making
himself a fortune off the works of other men who had never had, and who never would have the
opportunity to do the same for themselves, was in stark conflict with the ideal that an increasing
number of people thought to be at the heart of what it meant to be American.
Nobody would come to champion this view as strongly as Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) did.
Rising himself from relatively humble beginnings, born to a father who lost his land when Lincoln
was young, he would come to make himself a career as a successful lawyer and eventually assume
the highest office as President in 1860, appearing – like Andrew Jackson – very much as an
embodiment of the dream by virtue of his backgrounds and achievements. Lincoln and his
supporters in the north saw the expansion of slavery as a threat to the positive development of the
nation’s very identity as it was cast by the declaration of independence, and as political unrest grew,
the slave states of the south eventually decided that they would rather secede from the United
States, than change the ways that had earned them their power and wealth. Thus started the
American Civil War in 1861, yet while many continue to think that the war was fought precisely
over the issue of whether slaves should be freed or not, the objective as Lincoln saw it, was rather to
preserve the nation’s collective sense of self. Initially, the idea was to stop the spread of slavery, and
to allow it to die out, but it was more because Lincoln thought that slave owners had an unfair
advantage over other whites – immigrants for instance, who could not afford to buy slaves – than
because he was overly concerned about the inequality between whites and blacks:
“Lincoln was not opposed to slavery because he cared very much about slaves. He was
opposed because he cared very, very deeply about whites (and unlike some of his fellow
Republicans, he cared about all whites). Slavery was bad for them. And it was bad because it
11
Cullen, 2003, page 71
12
contaminated and, if left unchecked, would eventually destroy the American Dream in which he
believed so deeply.”12
In fact the important thing for us to notice, even as we see here that the ideas of the American
Dream were changing, is that the notion of equality was still much more narrowly understood than
it is today. We see this even with Lincoln self, as Cullen proceeds to quote him here:
“(“Negro equality! Fudge!!” he once wrote in exasperation over the rhetoric of his
enemies.) Freedom, he repeatedly asserted, was not the same thing as equality. “Certainly the
negro is not our equal in color–perhaps not in many other respects; still, in the right to put into
his mouth the bread his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every other man, white or
black,” he told a crowd in Springfield at the beginning of his Senate campaign in 1858. “In
pointing out that more has been given to you, you can not be justified in taking away the little
which has been given to him. All I ask for the negro is that if you do not like him, let him alone.
If God gave him but little, that little let him enjoy.””13
Abolishing slavery then, was but a means to allow America to develop as intended in the
declaration of independence, and while it was important to Lincoln, it was even more important to
keep America together:
““My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or
to destroy slavery,” he told newspaper editor Horace Greeley in August of 1862. “If I could
save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the
slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would
also do that.””14
This crucial period of American history shows us the extent of the power of the developing
American Dream, as Lincoln – one of the prime examples of the American self-made men –
committed his union to a bloody, costly war in an effort not so much to secure freedom and equality
for African Americans, but perhaps more simply to secure the nation’s obedience to the dream and
to secure the conditions for this dream’s continued growth at the heart of the nation’s identity. 15
12
Cullen, 2003, page 84
Cullen, 2003, page 88
14
Cullen, 2003, page 95
15
Section generally references: Cullen, 2003, page 59-102
13
13
1.5.4. The dream of equality
It turned out that by Lincoln eventually freeing the slaves without going so far as to making
sure they also got the benefit of equality, that issue remained to be struggled over the next century
after the civil war. Cullen references Democracy In America (1835) in which French author Alexis
de Tocqueville (1805-1859) predicted the problem long before the civil war was even fought:
““If I were called upon to predict the future, I should say that the abolition of slavery in
the South will, in the common course of things, increase the white repugnance for blacks.” This
was a matter of observation, not theory: “Inhabitants of the North avoid the Negroes with
increasing care in proportion as the legal barriers of separation are removed by the
legislature; why should not the same result take place in the South?” Tocqueville would have
readily understood how it was that so many Jim Crow laws of the post– Civil War era drew
their inspiration, even language, from northern laws.”16
Tocqueville was right it turned out. There were those that quickly eyed an opportunity to even
the scales between African- and Anglo-Americans, like Frederick Douglass, who in 1883 – seeing
that even while slaves were free they were still far from equal with whites – expressed a want to
pursue Lincoln’s idea even further by ““making the nation’s life consistent with the nation’s
creed.””17. As early as 1892 the country saw the beginnings of what would later become the civil
rights movement, when a coloured man named Homer Plessy (1862-1925) allowed himself to be
arrested for sitting in a train car designated for whites only, all in a planned effort to bring the matter
of segregation laws before a supreme court in a hope of bringing to attention just how unfair such
laws were. The court however, eventually ruled against Plessy, maintaining that while laws and
customs separated whites from coloured people, this did not necessarily entail that coloured were
not the equals of whites. The ruling was an expression of a time when Tocqueville’s predication
came true, as:
“The Plessy decision was part of a broader political effort to make two concepts that had
been widely considered virtually interchangeable into two that were wholly separate, even
antithetical.”18
16
Cullen, 2003, page 113
Cullen, 2003, page 114
18
Cullen, 2003, page 107
17
14
The two concepts Cullen mentions here are freedom and equality, and this time saw the
Republican Party beginning to develop the view that equality was a concept that was less a
condition for freedom and more a bond that could inhibit it. In their dedication to the idea of the
man who makes himself a fortune by virtue of his dedication and his talents, they saw the concept
of equality as:
“[…]a base “leveling” instinct that restricted freedom by insisting that everyone, even
those who were evidently superior, had to play by the same rules, respect the same limits. Any
assertion that people should be more equal than they theoretically already were smacked of
socialism–and socialism, like other “foreign” ideas, was thoroughly beyond the pale. Such
logic became the cornerstone of Republican ideology in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century–and, for that matter, the closing decades of the twentieth as well.”19
This notion then is at the root of struggle for the value of the concept equality that has gone on
since then, specifically whether it is desirable to have equality of condition or merely equality of
opportunity. The first half of the 20th century was then:
“[…]a desert in the history of American race relations. To a great degree, this was
because equality was simply not part of the national agenda–not in race relations or anywhere
else. This was the age of the Robber Barons, men who relished inequality of condition because
they believed in equality of opportunity.”
However, as years and history moved on, more people started to see – like Douglass had seen –
that the practice of segregation stood – like slavery had done in its time – in stark contrast to what
the American people really wanted to think of itself. World War II did its part, making Americans
question how much of a difference there was between a Nazi Germany that persecuted Jews a
United States that persecuted blacks. Such concerns grew in the years after the war, as did the socalled Civil Rights Movement, which eventually followed Plessy’s example by letting people be
arrested breaking segregation laws, for the chance to challenge these laws in court, hoping to prove
that they were ‘unconstitutional’. The most prominent figure of this movement was of course
Martin Luther King (1929-1968) who became a spokesperson and front figure for the movement,
eventually writing popular history with his famous “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963, in which he
joined previous voices in underscoring the prominence of the concept of equality in the American
Dream, while also pointing out that the country was not living by its dream:
19
Cullen, 2003, page 107
15
““It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up
and live out the true meaning of its creed–we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal.””20
Perhaps more importantly however, King later showed – in his last Sunday morning sermon –
an awareness of the complexity and tension at play between the equalities of condition and
opportunity, when he explained the congregation how the Emancipation Proclamation told the black
man:
“[…]“You’re free,” and left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do. And
the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man–
through an act of Congress it was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and
Midwest–which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants with an economic
floor.
[…]
And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves up
by their bootstraps. It’s all right to tell a man a man to lift himself up by his bootstraps, but it is
a cruel jest to tell a bootless man that he ought to lift himself up by his own bootstraps.”21
All of this just continues to show us, that even as the concept of an American Dream continued
to be at the heart of the nation’s sense of self for decades, the very meaning of the very ideas it held
highest continued to be redefined over the years, with the dream itself thus continually changing
both before, during and after the years in which the books that we shall soon look into were
written.22
1.5.5. The dream of home ownership
As we have seen by now, some of the central terms that the declaration of independence fused
with the American Dream – liberty and equality – were causes of intense ideological struggles over
the course of American history. It should come as no surprise then, that the one that appears the
most ambivalent at first glance, the ‘pursuit of happiness’, has undergone change as well. The
Americans needed to be free and equal in order to pursue happiness, and while it was so heatedly
20
Cullen, 2003, page 126
Cullen, 2003, page 128
22
Section generally references: Cullen, 2003, page 103-131
21
16
debated who had this freedom and equality and who had not, and what was to be done about it,
there were at any given time still a large amount of people that had enough of both to undertake this
pursuit of happiness. The question is though, what exactly did they pursue?
One thing that seemed majorly important to them, according to the next ‘dream’ Cullen
presents in his book, was and is to have a place to call their own:
Frequent statements to the contrary, the United States was never a “free,” “open,” or
“virgin” land. It has, nevertheless, afforded opportunities for a great many people (including
some black and Latino people, among others) to do something that was previously difficult, if
not impossible: acquire a place they could call their own. “The American Dream of owning a
home,” we call it. No American Dream has broader appeal, and no American Dream has been
quite so widely realized. Roughly two-thirds of Americans owned their homes at the start of this
century, and it seems reasonable to believe that many of the remaining third will go on to do
so. And if, like other American Dreams, this one is imperfect, even fatally flawed, it is also
extraordinarily resilient and versatile.23
For much of its young history, the United States was a frontier society, with vast ranges of land
rolling west only inhabited by Native Americans whose claim to the land was hardly respected or
even recognised by the government. Thus this land was used as a security valve for whatever social
pressure might have been cooking in the busy cities of the east. The Homestead Act of 1862 was
essentially a law that gave any free man the opportunity to journey west and claim a share of the
wilderness at no cost, and as such the government was basically telling the population that “if you
cannot find happiness where you are now, you can always journey west, and find a place that is
yours in which you can build happiness on your own terms”.
While the vision of then was a republican one, hoping to create a growing nation of free
farmers as opposed to having slavery spread further west, what the general public took away from it
and kept for posterity, was that America was a country in which you could find yourself your own
home. Over time the matter of where to find a home would change, with people finding these
homes both in the growing cities and in the new types of residential areas we now call suburbs, and
while a growing percentage of Americans would at some point acquire their own homes, there were
still many that would not. The important notion however, is that almost everybody – regardless of
colour or religion – learned to want a home, and they learned to want it so much that in some cases
23
Cullen, 2003, page 136
17
securing a home took on a higher importance than securing education – and hence the opportunity
for upwards mobility – for one’s children.
“Still another study, this one of cities with more than a hundred thousand residents at the
turn of the century, found that the proportion of immigrants who owned their own homes
ranged from 11 percent in New York City to 58 percent in Toledo. Among the native-born, by
contrast, 15 percent owned homes in New York City; the figure reached 40 percent in Los
Angeles. As one noted historian, Kenneth Jackson, has observed, “Obviously variation by city
and by ethnic group was enormous, but from an international perspective what is most
important about these statistics is that it was not a native-American, or middle-class, or urban
phenomenon, but an American phenomenon.””24
Even this dream for home ownership – as sensible as it seems – is not without its questionable
qualities however. As the allure of suburban society grew over the 20th century it fostered senses of
complacency and conformity that some believed were a threat to American individualism. Cullen
notes that for them:
“[…]this emphasis on “togetherness” imperiled the sense of independence and autonomy
that had characterized much of earlier American culture, replacing it with a sense of
conformity that was at best bland and at worst deeply hostile to pluralist traditions of
democracy.”25
Moreover, the want for a home was just a beginning. After the invention and rise to popularity
of the car, many of the people who had the home part done already, soon realised that they also
needed a car, and soon cars were so important to Americans that they would rather live through
periods of starvation than give up their car.26
1.5.6. The dream of effortless leisure
As we have just gone over, giving people the opportunity to go forth into the west and take
land for themselves on which to build their dreams, may very well have taught them to believe in a
free life in pursuit of happiness, but as we shall now see, the flipside is that it eventually also
allowed for some to get the notion, that happiness could be found with little effort. When the
founding fathers thought of men making their way based on their merits, and when Lincoln
24
Cullen, 2003, page 148
Cullen, 2003, page 153
26
Section generally references: Cullen, 2003, page 133-157
25
18
dreamed his dream of upwards mobility, the idea was that the ‘pursuit’ of happiness was very much
a strenuous movement. A man had to pay his dues, working first to attain the financial stability to
support himself and his family, and then hopefully later on improving his fortune enough so that he
would have the luxury of educating himself further, potentially realising himself as more than a
hard worker, furthering the common good as an artist or perhaps a politician. As would soon
become evident however – especially when gold was found in sunny California – plenty of
Americans were quite willing to make a gamble to skip some steps and arrive quickly at a life of
leisure.
The promises of gold, or indeed the even earlier promise of fertile land, were however only
early manifestations of California’s promise. What really flipped the American ideal of the hardworking man was the rise of the film industry. From its very beginning, the film industry was
noteworthy because it allowed the people behind a film to create something that, even when they
were done working on it, they could keep making money off it. Yet what was really intriguing to the
public was that the idea of making a film never seemed like hard work at all. Cullen recalls how
some of Hollywood’s very first celebrities, Mary Pickford (1892-1979) and Douglas Fairbanks
(1883-1939) enchanted the people with a very public lifestyle that looked positively effortless
compared to what many ordinary Americans did for a living.
From our modern perspective, we can easily see how this – the obsession with Hollywood and
celebrity life – has only become more common, and in it is easy to see a version of the American
dream which seems to stand apart from the more noble vision put forward by some of the early
Americans we have talked about this far. In this sense however, there is an idea which is even worse
to be found relatively close to California, in the casinos of Las Vegas, where men chase more
feverishly than anywhere in the world, the chance of realising wild dreams with only small bets.
There is a blurry line here, between the actual gamblers, and the pioneers who ‘gambled’ with the
security of their established lives to head west, whether in search of gold, land or maybe freedom to
practice their religion. There is a difference however, and it is a crucial one, for as Cullen observes,
a true gambler’s morals are completely different from the beliefs of a man who thinks that the world
is a place in which he is rewarded for effort and determination:
“The behavior fostered by gambling grew out of a different, competing notion of the
American Dream. For those who felt that the universe was a fair and orderly place–and,
especially, for those who enjoyed a lofty place in their communities–the underlying
19
assumptions of the gambling mentality were profoundly disturbing. At bottom, the gambler
does not instinctively regard the universe as a fair or orderly place, tending instead to believe
that the world’s arrangements are, if not arbitrary, then not finally knowable in any rational
way.”27
Moreover, the gambler not only gambles because of a disillusionment with the world as a place
in which he will be rewarded for his efforts, he also does so for the rush of putting something at
stake in a situation that is beyond his control. Also in this way we see a tendency that would have
conflicted wildly with the Americans of old, like Benjamin Franklin, who believed firmly in the
virtue of taking control of one’s own destiny.
As wrong as it seems though, after tracing the painstaking development the American dream
has gone under to develop virtuous interpretations of the terms liberty and equality, to then see it
take ‘wrong’ turns as people eventually start to see happiness as something to do with material
things like houses or cars, or privileges like laziness, we must be cautious and observe that things
are not as black and white as they appear. Firstly because none among us can likely claim that the
idea of leading a life that is both playful and prosperous is not an attractive one, just as we would
probably not complain at the thought of having secured a home, a car and the savings to ensure our
children education (and again, in turn an opportunity for upwards mobility). Secondly because
while presidents and founding fathers may have tried their best to define the American Dream, it
does not mean they have exclusive rights to it. The dream would never have become such a
common sense notion if it was not indeed the expression for the collective dreams of the American
people, even if there have at times been different parallel American Dreams contradicting each
other.28
With this in mind it is time to move on from talking about the Great Americans of history, to
some of the Great Americans of literature, in hopes of finding American Dreams in their fictional
depictions of American life. We move on carrying with us the versions and lines of development we
have observed along with Cullen in his tracking of the American Dream however, the idea being
that we now have something from the history of real America that we can use to reflect the
observations we will make in the stories of fictional America.
27
28
Cullen, 2003, page 163
Section generally references: Cullen, 2003, page 159-184
20
2. The Great Gatsby
2.1. Background
The Great Gatsby was written by Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and published in
April 1925. Fitzgerald was born into an upper-class family and attended Princeton University, but
eventually he dropped out before graduating and instead took up a commission in the US Army.
While in the army he started working on the book that would eventually be released as This Side Of
Paradise in 1920, which became a success and earned him the money to lead a lifestyle in the
higher social echelons of the so called ‘roaring twenties’ – or as he called it; The Jazz Age. The
1920’s was a period of great economic prosperity, and after marrying Zelda Sayre (1900-1948), a
woman Fitzgerald had long courted, the pair of them enjoyed the good life both in busy New York
and in France among famous expatriate American writers like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude
Stein. Fitzgerald finished four novels, yet he largely earned a living for Zelda and himself writing
short stories. He was an alcoholic for most of his life, and became frustrated when he eventually
met with little success in attempting to become a screenwriter. Meanwhile his wife increasingly
struggled with mental problems and would eventually become hospitalised, and Fitzgerald would
start seeing another woman, Sheilah Graham (1904-1988), in whose apartment he would eventually
die from a heart attack in December 1940.29
2.2. Summary
The story of The Great Gatsby takes place mainly in the high society of 1920’s New York.
Nick Carraway moves to the city to pursue a career as a bond salesman, and he soon starts to
socialise with his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan. Meanwhile he is fascinated by the
mysterious reputation of his next door neighbour Jay Gatsby, who is constantly hosting lavish
parties at his vast mansion. Eventually Nick is introduced to, and befriends Gatsby, who at first
seems to merely regard Nick as a man he can confide in, yet it soon turns out that Gatsby is
interested in Nick because he wants an excuse to get close to Daisy, who he courted in his youth,
before leaving America to fight in the First World War. As Nick narrates various casual excursions
to the city with either Gatsby or the Buchanans, we learn both that Tom is having an affair with
Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a car mechanic, and that Gatsby’s vast fortune might have been won
29
Section generally references: Cambridge, 1986, page 82-84
21
through dealings with various shady business contacts. Through Nick, Gatsby meets Daisy and to
begin with, they rekindle their relationship in secret. Gatsby however, wants Daisy to leave Tom,
seeing as his affection for her has been the root of his motivations to rise to his prominent social
position. When finally one day all parties are gathered on a trip to the city however, Daisy is
stricken with indecision in the crucial moment, revealing that she has at times loved Tom just as
well as she has loved Gatsby at others, with Tom all the while acting infuriated, accusing Gatsby of
being a man with no right to the high life he leads. In the confusion that follows, Daisy and Gatsby
get in Tom’s car to drive home, but as they drive past the Wilsons’ house, Myrtle storms out on the
road recognising the car, and is killed as a distraught Daisy hits her with the car and drives off too
scared to stop. To protect Daisy, Gatsby allows the others to believe that he was driving the car,
which Tom – angry with Gatsby and with the loss of Myrtle – tells Myrtle’s husband, who soon
shows up at Gatsby’s mansion with a gun, murdering Gatsby and then committing suicide. Nick
realises that despite Gatsby’s seeming popularity, nobody really cared about him, as Nick and
Gatsby’s father are the only people at the funeral. The story then ends with Nick feeling
disillusioned, reflecting on the events and deciding to break off his romance with the city of New
York and go back west again.30
2.3. Analysis
The Great Gatsby is undoubtedly among the most famous works of American literature ever
written, widely recognised not only as one of America’s greatest love stories but also, as our friend
Cullen puts it when he even devotes a few pages to it:
“The book has long been considered the quintessential Great American Novel – and, surely not
coincidentally, the quintessential expression of the American Dream.”31
Yet one might pause to question exactly why Gatsby is of use to our project of getting to know
the Americans and their dreams, when one considers that its status as literary work seems to come
mainly from the admirations hewn upon it for its technical and stylistic features, being one of the
most successful works of the modernist wave that rose in the early 20th century. In the next sections
however, we shall show that even when more interested in the book’s plot than in its stylistic merits,
there is plenty to be noticed and interpreted, and plenty to justify the nomination as the
quintessential expression of the American Dream. Furthermore, dealing with a love story seems a
30
31
Section generally references: Fitzgerald, 1925
Cullen, 2003, page 180
22
bit of a leap from all the historical, social struggles we have just gone through, yet it will also soon
be apparent how the story of Gatsby and Daisy’s affair can tell us quite a few things about the
American Dream, even if we forego an easy attempt to explain love as something closely related to
the pursuit of happiness.
2.3.1. Gatsby’s unusual love for Daisy
To get us started however, Kirk Curnutt, Professor and Chair of English at Troy University
Montgomery tells us in his chapter of The Cambridge History of The American Novel: “The Great
Gatsby and the 1920s” that:
“[…] curiously, few critics talk about The Great Gatsby as a love story anymore. While
the novel frequently tops polls of great American romances, its popular reputation exists
independently of its academic import. When commentators do invoke the word “love”, it tends
to follow the prefix “self-“ to reaffirm the conventional wisdom, that Gatsby’s “unutterable
visions” have less to do with winning the object of his affection than with selecting her to
embody his “platonic conception of himself.””32
In the novel, Gatsby is totally devoted in his love for Daisy, claiming to have not been with
another woman since he was with Daisy in their youth, yet the common perception is that the reason
for Gatsby’s infatuation is that ending up with Daisy would finally validate – as much to himself as
to his surroundings – his transformation from lowly origins to becoming a high society man.
Already here then, it seems we have a dream that looks like Cullen’s dream of upward mobility, but
there is more complexity to be uncovered.
Sticking with the romantic quality of the story, Curnutt observes that Gatsby and Daisy’s affair
is described in a very innocent manner compared to much of the prominent literature of the period.
The 1920s was a decade of sexual liberation: The ‘new woman’ or ‘flapper’ stereotype – that is a
woman who broke with many of the conservative expectations for her gender, living more freely
and indulging her own wishes and desires in a manner that was much opposed to what was
traditionally considered acceptable behaviour – was an ideal for more and more women, and in
literature several new works gained attention for venturing past what had previously been
considered the limits of obscenity. Gatsby is an unusual leading male in a romantic story of the time
because of his lack of aggression in his pursuit of Daisy, as Curnutt explains by comparing Gatsby
32
Curnutt in Cambridge, 2011, page 639
23
to the more typical leading male in Edith Maude Hull’s (1880-1947) The Sheik (1919) whom the
leading female character falls in love with even after he kidnaps and forces himself upon her. In
Gatsby however Fitzgerald wrote a story that was more about falling in love than about falling in
bed, and in Jay Gatsby he wrote a character that broke with the stereotypical male in contemporary
romances. The male characters in such stories would normally be aggressive and animalistic, and in
their pursuit of their desired woman they would eventually ‘take’ her. Gatsby shows no such
behaviour. In fact, in the novel’s climactic scene, he leaves it to Daisy to finally confirm that she is
leaving Tom for him, and instead it is Tom who – in the villain’s role – makes the decision for Daisy
by simple dominance, forging reality with his words when he says that Gatsby and Daisy’s affair is
now over.
What further demonstrates the normal dynamic between genders at the time, is the
stereotypical woman in romances, whom Daisy can in some ways be seen as a representative of.
When in years prior female characters had often sought to preserve their honour, the stories of this
period would often see them yield the advances of their male counterparts. Curnutt refers to a scene
in The Sheik when the male lead Ahmed Ben Hassan “for all intents and purposes rapes kidnapped
heroine Diana Mayo”33 and further writes that:
“It may well be, as Karen Chow argues, that this oft-imitated scenario became “a
common trope in romance novels” because the forced seduction allows Diana “to lose her
inhibitions without taking moral responsibility for doing so” and “consequently … to express
herself sexually.””34
It must be noted that Gatsby does not remain sexually passive because he does not know how
to act in the role of the aggressive male, as we know about Gatsby that he has known women before
Daisy, and that he does initially ‘take her’ with a likely intention to “take what he could and go”35.
It was only at a later rendezvous with her “that he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable
visions to her perishable breath” 36 that Gatsby’s dream of Daisy changed into the for the time
unusual one that the book centres around.
Gatsby’s American Dream is – much like Lincoln’s dream for all Americans – a dream to rise
from a status as nobody to become somebody. While Gatsby tells Nick that he was born to wealthy
33
Curnutt in Cambridge, 2011, page 644
Curnutt in Cambridge, 2011, page 644
35
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 155
36
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 119
34
24
parents, his father reveals towards the end of the book, that he did in fact run away from a humble
home to seek his fortune. Driven by a desire to transcend his low status, Gatsby would eventually
become wealthy however, though it is hinted on several occasions that he did so by shady means,
running a bootlegging operation during the era of prohibition. Before he did he had met Daisy, who
at the time appeared to him like they type of woman of high stature that a man like him was never
meant to have access to, and so while he would go on to become rich, this would no longer be
enough for Gatsby to feel that his transformation was fully realised. Rather he needs Daisy to
actively choose to be with him, something which is impossible to her because she, representing the
typical female role, has not got an active role in romantic relations. Love only happens to her.
It seems then, that in Gatsby, Fitzgerald has created a main character that – apart from
embodying at least one version of the American dream – also embodies a belief in a more even,
mutual love relationship than the one that was prominent in the fiction of his time. With Daisy being
the way she is however, Fitzgerald does not seem to have much faith in this kind of love being a
realisable sort of ‘happiness’ one can pursue. Gatsby’s dream is eventually denied him by
conventional lover Tom and by Daisy’s inactivity, and when he is eventually buried at a funeral
which nobody wants to attend, we also get the idea that all of his riches and gained social stature did
him little good in the end. Of the two sides to his dream then, one eventually seems hollow and the
other unattainable, so even when Nick eventually tells us that Gatsby was worth all the other
characters put together, we can understand it when Curnutt calls The Great Gatsby:37
“[…]both a critique of and a tribute to the power of America as an ideal to inspire
“dreams…commensurate to (one’s) capacity for wonder”38
2.3.2. The Great Gatsby as mobilization fiction
Still, it is possible to learn even more about America and its dream(s) if we, as suggested by
Keith Gandal, professor in English at the university of Northern Illinois, in “The Great Gatsby as
Mobilization Fiction: Rethinking Modernist Prose”, the 7th chapter of A Concise Companion to
American Fiction 1900–1950 (2008). Gandal notes, as we did earlier, that American modernist
fiction and hence The Great Gatsby is too commonly assessed only for its stylistic innovations,
suggesting that we rather look at the history of the period. The main incentive for doing so is
because Fitzgerald has written Gatsby as a man with a military background, and in fact it is only
37
38
Section generally references: Curnutt in Cambridge, 2011 page 639-650
Curnutt in Cambridge, 2011, page 640
25
through his status as an officer in the US Army that he gains access to Daisy’s company before he
becomes a man of wealth. This has significance because it is likely inspired by Fitzgerald’s own
time in the army, when he experienced first-hand the new methods being employed as the country
mobilised for its participation in World War I. The administration of President Woodrow Wilson
(1913-1921) wanted the war effort to be organised as effectively as possible, and hence ordered the
application of a broad range of scientific methods in the mobilisation effort. Most notably, young
men entering the army would now be tested thoroughly in an attempt to figure out which would
work best in the variety of roles the Army needed filled. This meant that for the first time in the
history of the country, whether or not you could become an officer did not depend on your
background as much as it depended on your abilities. This in itself can be seen as an important step
for American Dreams of both equality and upward mobility.
This worked out poorly for Fitzgerald in real life, seeing as his upper class roots could not help
the fact that his lacking abilities as a leader barred him from getting the promotions he wanted. He
felt the military’s new meritocratic approach on himself: The US military, an institution that had the
power to confer or defer masculinity, was now doing so based on abilities, and as an effect, men of
lesser backgrounds now had the opportunity to pass Fitzgerald by. Jay Gatsby however, having run
away from home, changed his name from Jimmy Gatz and invented a whole new life for himself,
was exactly the kind of man who would benefit from the system. We learn from Gatsby that he was
an officer in the army and that he fought in Europe during the war, doing so well that he was
promoted and awarded a medal 39, and that he was subsequently allowed to study at prestigious
Oxford University.
Gatsby’s rise in status may have come mainly from his earning a lot of money through illegal
activities however for him to even get education and be allowed in higher social circles, the new US
military of the early 20th century was the vessel. Furthermore, Gandal notes that it also fits the
picture that Tom – a man from a good family who likely attended University primarily based on that
– harbours such suspicion and animosity towards Gatsby, even before he is fully aware of the affair
with Daisy. He explains how ‘high born’ Americans who had benefitted from the old system, did
what they could after the war to restore a balance in which power, wealth and status would still be
largely exclusive to them. Tom is then exactly the type who would indeed dislike a man like Gatsby
out of principle alone.
39
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 72
26
If Gatsby and Tom represent accurate historical types then so does Daisy. Although we have
previously discussed her passivity, it is hinted in a flashback by Nick’s romantic interest and Daisy’s
friend Jordan Baker 40 that it was promiscuity with soldiers on a younger Daisy’s behalf, that
initially inspired Jordan to become the ‘new woman’ type she is when the story takes place. By her
being interested in military men before and during the war, Gandal explains that Daisy is more like
a so-called ‘charity girl’. Before this time it was only normal for soldiers both in camp and on the
front to have sexual interactions with both prostitutes and regular women who were drawn to men
in uniform, and according to Gandal, the Gatsby’s flashbacks about the young Daisy casts her as
one of the latter.
This is relevant because in their desire to make the mobilization effort as effective as possible,
the military had now decided that it wanted to root out what it considered a problem because the
fraternisation between these women and the soldiers potentially spread at best poor morale, and at
worst venereal diseases:
“Under the Selective Service Act and what was called the American Plan, “the military
could arrest any woman within five miles of a military cantonment.” And under “the new
health laws, when women were arrested, their civil rights were suspended.””41
What is more important than what was done about the women however, is what was done
about the men:
“Meanwhile, faced with the threat posed to soldiers by venereal disease and the moral
contamination of prostitutes and “charity girls,” the American army looked not only to the
detention of women but to the re-education of soldiers. That is, in the face of women apparently
abandoning sentimentality for promiscuity, the army tried to prompt regular recruits to step
into the role of defender of chastity, a role traditionally belonging to women or to highly
cultured males.”42
Utilising the power of propaganda, the Wilson administration made every attempt to recast the
American World War 1 soldier as a ‘pure and worthy champion’ who would fight in defence of
moral values in battles, and abstain from any sort of rowdy behaviour between them:
40
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 80-84
Gandal in Stoneley, Weinstein, 2008, page 6
42
Gandal in Stoneley, Weinstein, 2008, page 8
41
27
“A CTCA[43] propaganda pamphlet made explicit the connection between the American
military's moral crusade and the chastity of its troops: “You are going to fight for the spirit of
young girlhood raped and ravished in Belgium by a brutal soldiery …But in order to fight for
so sacred a cause you must be worthy champions. You must keep your bodies clean and your
hearts pure.””44
Or, to make it abundantly clear:
“A German Bullet Is Cleaner Than A Whore.”45
With this in mind, it is suddenly a smaller wonder that Gatsby remains as devoted and faithful
to Daisy over his years of being absent from her. While he was not around Daisy, he was placed in a
constant discourse that promoted chastity and faithfulness, so according to Gandal, it makes all
kinds of sense that he returns wanting to re-establish the union between him and Daisy, saving her
from the dominance of the brutal Tom. Even after Daisy fails him in her crucial moment of
indecision, Gatsby still stands vigil outside of her house, ready to storm in and protect her in case
Tom should get violent.46 This is exactly the kind of role that the military has told him he needs to
inhabit.
Of course Gatsby’s buying into the army’s new ideal of the ‘new man’ does place him in the
minority, as even all the propaganda at the government’s disposal could not change the ways of all
their soldiers instantly:
“Only about 30 percent of American soldiers who went to Europe in the Great War
refrained from sex. His temperance (with alcohol) and his chivalry would equally have singled
him out from the mainstream.”47
So we see that Gatsby is ahead of his peers when it comes to taking to the army’s new ideal,
and the key to understanding this lies in the understanding that when he is more susceptible to input
from the military, it is because its new system has catered to his dream. Because of the merit-based
recruitment efforts and promotion system, Gatsby found in the military an organisation in which he
could realise his dream of upward mobility, and this makes him more likely to believe in it.
43
Commission on Training Camp Activities
Gandal in Stoneley, Weinstein, 2008, page 8
45
Gandal in Stoneley, Weinstein, 2008, page 8
46
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 151-152
47
Gandal in Stoneley, Weinstein, 2008, page 9
44
28
While it seems that Gatsby is a man ahead of his contemporaries, appearing as a progressive
ideal of the romantic male, Gandal notes – like Curnutt did – that the whole truth of the matter is
not as simple, nor as bright as that. Firstly because, while Gatsby’s time in the military would have
trained him to be chivalrous in his relations with women, his time in the war would no doubt have
taught him to kill. He himself recounts how he led a group of men during the war who were
responsible for “piles of dead”48 and even among those of his party guests that are only guessing
about his past, rumour has it that “One time he killed a man[…]”49. Referencing historian Robert
Rockaway, Gandal compares Gatsby to a real life Jewish gangster Samuel ‘Nails’ Morton:
“Nails rose through the ranks to become a first lieutenant. He received the Croix de
Guerre, France's highest decoration for bravery, for capturing a machine gun nest despite
being wounded. He returned to Maxwell street [a Jewish neighborhood in Chicago] a hero,
became a bootlegger, and put his training in weapons and warfare to practical use. Morton
was [after the war] a stylish dresser and high liver who loved horseback riding … After his
death, Nails was characterized as a man who led a number of lives. To one set of
acquaintances he was a gallant soldier … And to the police, a notorious gangster.”50
Gatsby’s darker side as a reputed criminal and killer combines with the fact that – even for all
the noble, wide-eyed ideals taught to him by the military – even his most sympathetic dream of
winning Daisy eventually ends in failure, and provides us with two notions that further our
impression that while Gatsby is romanticised after his death, his character and the values and
realities it represents, are not immune to critical perspectives. As Gandal puts it:
“[…]the successful are blinded by illusions; they tend to believe too uncritically in the
system that has promoted them, along with the system's illusions. This is their vulnerability.”51
As a final note in this context, it is also worth observing that while Gatsby’s abilities and
dedication earns him advancement in the military, his eventual rise to wealth via crime is probably
not the character building one that Franklin or Lincoln would have applauded. On numerous
occasions during the story we find Gatsby forcing his pose as the rich, socialite gentleman, and as
Gandal notes:
48
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 72
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 67
50
Gandal in Stoneley, Weinstein, 2008, page 2
51
Gandal in Stoneley, Weinstein, 2008, page 11
49
29
“Cody did not teach Gatsby how to be moral but how to be rich or upper class and so pull
off his self-fabrication as an Anglo from a good family; thus does Fitzgerald seem to anticipate
historian Warren Susman's insight that what makes for success in the modern, corporate age is
personality or likeability, not moral character.”52
This observation resonates with Cullen, who equates Gatsby’s dream more with the dream he
calls “The Dream of the Coast” (which is the one described in this paper’s chapter on “The dream
of effortless leisure”) than with the dream of upward mobility, simply because Gatsby’s reinvented
high life persona is such a fraud. His great reputation is built – like those of the celebrities idolised
by those who dream of the coast and effortless living – on his lifestyle and personality, not his
morals or accomplishments.
2.3.3. Nick Carraway the middle man
Between the characters in The Great Gatsby we begin to see a struggle over the meaning of the
American Dream(s) not unlike the ones we have charted in the previous chapter on the dream’s
history. Gatsby and Tom represent conflicting interests here. Gatsby dreams of America as a place
where he can transcend his low birth and remake himself in the image of success, and he dreams of
a new kind of love, in which the woman has the agency and loyalty to actively choose a lover and
the man acts more as her valiant defender than as sexual aggressor. For each of Gatsby’s noble,
progressive dreams however, Tom is the counterpart, with his dominant treatment of Daisy, his
adultery with Myrtle, his belief in the Nordics being the “dominant race” 53 and his dismay at
learning that Gatsby – a “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere”54 – did in fact go to Oxford55; he represents
the established values and the status quo.
Located in the middle between Gatsby and Tom we have Nick, our narrator of the story who in
several ways is the perfect medium for us to witness the events of the story from. We learn from
Nick at the very beginning that he was born into a good family, that he went to Yale with Tom and
that he fought in the war like Gatsby, and later that he considers himself “one of the few honest
people that [he has] ever known”56. Furthermore, Nick appears highly respectable with the way he
acts throughout the story, always taking care to only reveal his emotional responses to even the
52
Gandal in Stoneley, Weinstein, 2008, page 2
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 19
54
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 136
55
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 135
56
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 66
53
30
most dramatic events between him and the reader, guarding them from the other characters behind
an unwavering demeanour of poise and propriety. We as readers are thus instinctively likely to find
him trustworthy and to take his presentation of events to heart. Not just because Nick, an AngloAmerican who went from University to army yet without attaining the merit-based promotion that
Gatsby did, looks very much like the image of real life Fitzgerald, but also because he sits in a very
realistic captivity between the admiration for Gatsby’s dreamy, naïve idealism and the confines of
the expectations of reality.
Nick is not a saint. As argued by Scott Donaldson, professor in American Studies from
University of Minnesota, in Critical Essays On Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1984): Nick claims
to withhold all judgment, yet he judges everything and everyone he sees over the course of the
books, he merely keeps his judgment between him and the readers. This however, only makes him
appear more normal and relatable to real life readers. Furthermore we can probably all relate when
we see Nick struggle with his more moral notions over the course of the book. He sees that Tom
mistreats Daisy, and that he commits shameless adultery with Myrtle for instance, and we know that
“it seemed to [him] that the right thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in
arms”57. Yet Nick never speaks or acts to right any of the sins or injustices he bears witness to
because he is too concerned with how to act – what is proper. He does not want to meddle in these
people’s personal business because he thinks it is not his place. In fact Nick is such a snob about
acting with good manners and propriety, that Donaldson sees this as the main reason it takes him so
long to realise his admiration for Gatsby, because he struggle to get past the notion that Gatsby is a
poser, who shows on more than one occasion that acting properly is an act that he cannot
completely pull off.
“Most of all he disapproves of those who do not know how to act. That is why it takes him
so long to ascertain that Jay Gatsby, a walking compendium of social gaucheries, is
nonetheless worth any number of Buchanans.”58
This restrained behaviour means that Nick barely has any agency in the book at all, save for his
facilitating the meeting between Gatsby and Daisy (which he does at Gatsby’s request). Otherwise
he simply observes, reflects and narrates. In his reflections however, we see that he is not content
like this. The struggle between Tom and Gatsby is very much alive in Nick, as he actually admires
57
58
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 27
Donaldson, 1984, page 132
31
each of them in their own way. For all his contempt and judgment towards Tom, Nick notices his
physicality and masculinity, and in him no doubt sees a person that, unrestricted with his bullish,
old-fashioned convictions, manages to get things done in a way Nick cannot. Even more however,
Nick finds himself coming to admire Gatsby because:
“The fact is that both Nick and Gatsby have romantic inclinations. The difference is that
Gatsby guides his life by his dream, while Nick carefully separates romance from reality. What
he most admires in Gatsby is the “extraordinary gift for hope,” the “romantic readiness” he
has found in no one else.”59
This tendency we see most clearly in the fact that Nick carefully avoids getting in too deep in
any of his relationships. One of the reasons he has come to New York is to escape rumours of being
engaged to a woman back home60, he later reveals having let a superficial affair with an unnamed
girl from Jersey City “blow away” when she went on vacation61 and he turns away from Jordan
even while confessing to himself that he is “half in love with her”. 62 He does so even despite
recognising, on his 30th birthday that she is what is between him and:
“[…] the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning
brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair”63
2.3.4. The Great Gatsby as a story about great, ambiguous American Dreams
The American Dream then, is very much alive in and between the lines of The Great Gatsby,
which certainly seems like more than just a story about love. Gatsby dreams; superficially about
living the high life and having Daisy as a partner that validates his status, yet also deeply about the
possibility of upwards mobility and of a love relationship more equal than the normal taker/taken
relationship of this time. Nick sees and admires this, but like the historical Americans we learned
about, he finds himself unable to actually live in accordance with such dreams. The ambiguity of
The Great Gatsby however, is that while Nick suffers for being too much of a realist to dare to
dream, Gatsby the dreamer suffers more from following his big dreams, having Daisy taken away
from him by conservative Tom and eventually paying the ultimate price when he valiantly covers
for her. Hence we can only echo Cullen when he concludes that:
59
Donaldson, 1984, page 136
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 26
61
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 63
62
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 185
63
Fitzgerald, 1925, page 142
60
32
“Indeed, the great paradox of The Great Gatsby is that even as Gatsby pursues his dream
through instruments of fraud and adultery there is a deeply compelling purity about his
ambition, especially given the smug pieties of those around him (hence Nick’s sincere
pronouncement that Gatsby is “worth the whole damn bunch of them put together”). Rather,
the real problem is that any American Dream is finally too incomplete a vessel to contain
longings that elude human expression or comprehension. We never reach the Coast we think we
see. Still we go on dreaming. Even those of us who have the means and desire to pursue their
dreams finally have no power over what they happen to be: dreams usually come to us
unbidden and are not typically practical or easy to achieve (otherwise they wouldn’t be
dreams). What makes the American Dream American is not that our dreams are any better,
worse, or more interesting than anyone else’s, but that we live in a country constituted of
dreams, whose very justification continues to rest on it being a place where one can, for better
and worse, pursue distant goals.”64
It would be difficult to express this ambiguity much more accurate than that. By giving his
dreamer such a tragic end, Fitzgerald has shown us both that he understands the allure of the
American Dream, yet he is also wary of its perils.
64
Cullen, 2003, page 182
33
3. The Grapes of Wrath
3.1. Background
In The Great Gatsby we have seen Americans struggle with their dreams, both internally and
among each other, and yet, those were merely the struggles of privileged people, living in a decade
that was one of the most prosperous of the nation’s history. For an entirely different American
perspective we move onto The Grapes of Wrath. Written during The Great Depression by John
Steinbeck (1902-1968) and released in 1939, the book arrived to extreme praise from the
Communist Party who hailed it as the quintessential American proletarian novel65 while it made
Steinbeck extremely unpopular in his home state of California, for the way it made villains of the
state’s successful farmers. Steinbeck himself was born and raised by established middle-class
parents in the town of Salinas, and he was already an established writer by the time Grapes was
published, having written several books before it, and he would come to write several more after it,
consistently trying his hand at different genres. Steinbeck became inspired to write Grapes when he
became acquainted with California’s farm labour problem in 1934, and in 1937-1938 he made visits
to camps of migrant farm workers. During the depression, thousands of families were forced from
their small farms in states like Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas by forces of industrialisation and
economy beyond their control and understanding, and many who came to California looking for
work found only miserable living conditions and wages on which it was hardly possible to sustain
themselves. Grapes brought the hardship of these people to national attention and was considered
Steinbeck’s greatest achievement, and while critical response to his other work would be
inconsistent, Steinbeck mostly stayed popular with the wide audience and won the Pulitzer Prize for
Grapes in 1940 as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. The book has been listed among
those that best “defined the American character” and “remains in regular consideration as the
Great American Novel”66 Steinbeck being awarded with the Nobel Prize caused such a massive
negative backlash however, that it discouraged him from ever writing another novel. He suffered a
stroke in May of 1968 and eventually died in New York in November of the same year, aged 66.67
65
Alan M. Wald in Cambridge, 2011, page 671
Meyer, Railsback, 2006, page 129
67
Section generally references the Chronology chapter in Meyer, Railsback, 2006, pages il-lviii
66
34
3.2. Summary
The main plot of The Grapes Of Wrath follows the Joad family who, like many other
Oklahoma farming families, are forced off their family land by banks, after the so-called Dust Bowl
has caused poor harvests and left people unable to pay their loans. Tom Joad is returning home on
parole, after having been imprisoned for killing a man in a fight. He picks up former preacher Jim
Casy on the way home and the two eventually meet up with the remaining Joad family: Tom’s
parents, his grandparents, his brothers Noah, Al and Winfield; his sisters Rose Of Sharon and Ruthie
and his uncle John. Along with Rose Of Sharon’s husband Connie, the family is preparing to leave
for California, having heard that there is plenty of work to be found there, and Tom and Jim decide
to join them as they set out in an old car, even despite the fact that crossing state lines means that
Tom breaks his parole.
The journey proves a hard one though as the Joads realise that many families like them are
risking all on similar journeys, and that the locals along the way are all but helpful to the dirty
penniless migrants, with authorities in several places telling them to keep going because nobody
wants them to stay. Pushing on, both of Tom’s grandparents die before the family arrives in
California, and as soon as they do, they find that their prospects are hardly better here than they
were back home, as the mass of migrants flocking to the state means that there’s not enough work to
go around, and that wages for the work there is are extremely low. Furthermore, local law
enforcement is seemingly completely in the pocket of corporate farmers, making sure to disrupt the
efforts of anyone suggesting that the migrant workers need to organise and stand up for themselves.
On one such occasion, violence ensues and Tom knocks a policeman down. Seeing that the family
needs Tom for their continued survival, Casy takes the blame and is taken away by the police.
The Joads find temporary respite in a government sponsored camp in which local police is not
allowed. There is neither enough space nor enough money to shelter all the families in need
however, so the Joads eventually decide to leave to try to find work elsewhere. They do so as
strikebreakers at a big farm, where Tom eventually finds out that Casy – having been released – is
organising the strike. Deputies arrive at the scene and things again turn violent. Casy is killed and
Tom kills the responsible deputy in return. Wanted for murder, Tom decides to leave the family for
their protection. Out of money and out of food, the family eventually struggles to find shelter for the
flood of winter rain. The pregnant Rose Of Sharon gives birth to a stillborn baby and the novel ends
with the remaining members of the Joad family taking shelter in a barn, with prospects of surviving
35
the winter looking slim, although Ma Joad and Rose Of Sharon refuse to give up as the latter, in the
final paragraph, offers her breast milk to a stranger who is dying of starvation. 68
3.3. Analysis
If The Great Gatsby was a book with which we had to do things differently from the norm by
not focusing on its stylistic innovations, Steinbeck’s Grapes Of Wrath is the direct opposite69. It has
been called straight forward and overly sentimental and for years after its release various voices in
Cold War America sought to diminish its importance, labelling it a mere protest novel inspired by
dangerous socialist sentiments. Taking a point of departure however, in A John Steinbeck
Encyclopedia (2006) by Michael J. Meyer and Brian Railsback – both professors in English, at
University of Western Carolina and DePaul University Chicago respectively – the volume’s entry
on Grapes exposes us to ideas that hint that the story might have more complexity to offer. Meyer
and Railsback point out the possible religious significance of the family of twelve who are
accompanied by the former preacher whose initials are J.C. – a man who throughout the novel
seems to develop a new sort of faith – all of them journeying towards a promised land, a plentiful
Garden of Eden. Furthermore it is suggested that Steinbeck, who was fascinated with holistic views
of nature and society, was not so much trying to be an advocate of socialism or communism, as he
was trying to convey a more down to earth notion of the virtue of caring for others, letting the Joad
family in his story gradually learn that both circumstances and morals compel them to share what
little they have, even outside of their own family.
3.3.1. Religious symbolism and reaffirmation
In Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Grapes Of Wrath by Robert Con Davis, Professor
in English at the University of Oklahoma, we find a number of essays helpful to elaborate the things
pointed out by Meyer and Railsback. The first of them is “Steinbeck’s Wine of Affirmation in The
Grapes of Wrath” by Professor in English at the University of Chicago J. Paul Hunter, which seeks
to establish a defence for the final two chapters in Grapes, as they:
“[…]are said to demonstrate the final inability of Steinbeck to come to grips, except in a
superficial way, with the ideological and artistic problems posed in the novel”70
68
Section generally references Cambridge, 1986, page 99 and Steinbeck, 1939
Davis, 1982, page 2
70
Hunter in Davis, 1982, page 37
69
36
To Hunter it seems that that the Joads have a journey to make that is more than just coming to
California from their home near Sallisaw, Oklahoma. It is in fact a spiritual journey they must make
– or perhaps rather a lesson they must learn. Jim Casy is the first to grasp at this lesson as he
improvises saying grace over breakfast early in the story, despite no longer considering himself a
preacher:
“An' I got thinkin', on'y it wasn't thinkin, it was deeper down than thinkin'. I got thinkin'
how we was holy when we was one thing, an' mankin' was holy when it was one thing. An' it
on'y got unholy when one mis'able little fella got the bit in his teeth an' run off his own way,
kickin' an' draggin' an' fightin'. Fella like that bust the holiness. But when they're all workin'
together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the whole shebang—
that's right, that's holy.”71
Hunter sees Casy as central to the structure of Grapes and explains that this is best seen against
the Biblical background that we already saw suggested by Meyer and Railsback. Along with Hunter
we find a number of parallels between features of Grapes and stories from the bible. The twelve
members of the Joad family correspond to the twelve tribes of Israel, like the animals on Noah’s ark
they board the truck two by two as they leave for the promised land and when Grampa Joad dies of
sorrow having to leave the only life he has known, Tom quotes the biblical Lot, whose wife was
turned into a pillar of salt for looking back, as the couple was fleeing the destruction of Sodom.
Furthermore, Hunter says of Jim Casy:
“He embarks on his mission after a long period of meditation in the wilderness; he
corrects the old ideas of religion and justice; he selflessly sacrifices himself for his cause, and
when he dies he tells his persecutors, “ ‘You don’ know what you’re a-doin’.’
[…]
Casy had been a typical hell-and-damnation evangelist who emphasized the rigidity of the
old moral law and who considered himself ultimately doomed because human frailty prevented
his achieving the purity demanded by the law. His conversion to a social gospel represents a
movement from Old Testament to New Testament thought, an expanded horizon of
responsibility.”72
71
72
Steinbeck, 1939, page 55
Hunter in Davis, 1982, page 41
37
The point for Hunter then is that Steinbeck “[…]along the outlines of Judeo-Christian myth
[…]” sets the direction of thought for the novel as “a widening of concern.”73. This direction or
movement is particularly evident in one of the novel’s many interludes in which Steinbeck steps
away from the particular story of the Joads and make more omniscient observations on the state of
society:
“One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to
the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in
the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The
two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. […] here “I lost my land” is
changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the […]”We lost our land.” […] two men
are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first “we” there grows a still more
dangerous thing: “I have a little food” plus “I have none.” If from this problem the sum is “We
have a little food,” the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little
multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. […] This is the beginning—from “I” to
“we.””74
This movement is the movement the Joads eventually makes, the lesson they eventually learn,
though it takes them long enough. Al does not initially understand why the men of the Californian
camps goes working together (it saves them money for gas). Rose of Sharon and Connie spend most
of their time together thinking about how to break away from the rest of the family, and Connie
eventually does so on his own, as does Noah. Uncle John saves money for himself so he can get
drunk and Ruthie constantly shows selfish behaviour towards other kids in the story. Even the more
responsible characters; Ma, Pa and Tom, to begin with limit their concerns to apply to the family.
Yet when Tom avenges Casy’s death and becomes a liability to the family, he decides to seize
the opportunity to go out and continue Casy’s work with the organisation of workers. When the
family is in danger of being flooded by the rain, Pa Joad organises the men of several families to
build a dam (although their efforts eventually prove to be futile). At that point, the Joads have
shared shelter with another family, the Wainwrights, the daughter of whom – Aggie – the previously
skirt chasing Al resolves to marry when he gets her pregnant. And by the end of the novel, at which
point the Joads have endured so much misery that the act of enduring has almost become
73
74
Hunter in Davis, 1982, page 42
Steinbeck, 1939, page 101-102
38
synonymous with them and the people who share their situation, we see the final act of sacrificing
old convention for the common good, as Rose of Sharon offers her breastmilk to an old man the
family has just met. To Hunter this is the point and the satisfactory resolution of the story: That the
people can endure and go on, so long as they are willing to change and adapt to thinking about the
common good rather than just about themselves.
3.3.2. Jefferson, the Joads and a new frontier
This movement described by Hunter is where we can begin to see that just as in The Great
Gatsby, the American Dream is being treated here. In another essay: “Agrarianism and Technology
in Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath” the author: Professor in English at Kiel University Horst
Groene attributes to Steinbeck an influence from “agrarian thinking which can be traced back to
Benjamin Franklin, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and especially to Thomas Jefferson […]”75.
This comes as little surprise when we learn from Meyer and Railsback that Steinbeck’s own father
had wanted to be a farmer and taught his children how to garden, and that Steinbeck had a strong
connection to the land and was never without a garden, attempting to grow plants in his apartment
even during the last days before his death. 76 The Joads are descendants of the freeholders that
Franklin and Jefferson wanted a nation of, their ancestors the likely beneficiaries of the Homestead
Act and Steinbeck romanticises them as good, generous and helpful people – people of virtue.
The dream of home ownership, as realised by the American freeholder is obsolete however, as
Steinbeck shows us over the course of Grapes. Especially because the solution of Franklin and
Jefferson’s time: to go forth into the west, is no longer an option, as the Joads arrive in California
and find that this frontier is very much closed and has been so for some time. In fact, historian
Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) had already declared it closed as early as in 1893.77
While Grapes is ripe with examples of Steinbeck disapproving of the advances of
industrialisation, with faceless tractor drivers demolishing people’s homes and driving them off
their land, he does however seem to realise that technology in itself is not invariably evil, as seen by
Groene who recalls the following paragraph:
“Along the rows, the cultivators move, tearing the spring grass and turning it under to
make a fertile earth, breaking the ground to hold the water up near the surface, ridging the
75
Groene in Davis, 1982, page 128
Meyer, Railsback, 2006, page xlii
77
Cullen, 2003, page 143
76
39
ground in little pools for the irrigation, destroying the weed roots that may drink the water
away from the trees.”78
Groene finds further proof of Steinbeck’s ‘getting with the times’ in how Al takes charge in the
Joad family when Tom is forced to leave. While Tom, like previous Joads and like Steinbeck
himself, feels the strong connection to the land, Al’s talents lie as a mechanic, as he proves his skill
with the family car several times throughout the story. His plan is from the beginning to go off and
make his life as a mechanic once the family is settled in California, and by his stepping forward
towards the very end of the story, Groene sees Al as a sign that Steinbeck eventually accepts that
people like the Joads must not only change to care about others outside of the family, they must also
learn that opportunities are no longer to be found as yeoman farmers – rather they are to be found in
the city, working with industrialisation instead of against it.79
3.3.3. The price of American individualism
If Hunter saw Grapes ending on a positive note and Groene saw in Al a way forward for the
Joads, Stuart L. Burns, Professor in English at Drake University, Des Moines, is less optimistic in
his essay “The Turtle or the Gopher: Another Look at the Ending of The Grapes Of Wrath”. The
main point of the essay is to question a common reading of the third chapter of Grapes which
Steinbeck dedicates entirely to a turtle trying to cross a road. Burns explains that many see the
turtle’s journey as a symbolic counterpart to that of the Joads, in that its resilient perseverance is
like that of the family which, despite their hardships display a resolve to endure. Burns himself does
not however, see things the same way:
“Twelve Joads spanning three generations (thirteen spanning four if one counts the
unborn baby) begin the journey; although ten presumably survive, only six are together at the
end. The emphasis is on attrition, not continuance.”80
The particulars of Burns’ pessimism on the Joad family’s behalf are not so important to us
however as is the fact that he also takes special interest in Al Joad. Like Groene, Burns sees Al as a
man who has the necessary tools to survive as the times are changing, but unlike Groene, he does
not see him doing so by lending his talents to the family:
78
Steinbeck, 1939, page 237
Groene in Davis, 1982, page 133
80
Burns in Davis, 1982, page 101
79
40
“If there is one character in the novel who seems most likely to survive and make a decent
life for himself, that would have to be Al Joad. But Al will succeed only if he has the
callousness to wrest himself from free of family dependence on him–he is the only remaining
member who can drive the truck–and get himself that dreamed-of job in a garage. That is to
say, he can survive by joining the side that owns and runs the machines; by acting, in short, a
little less like a decent human being and a little more like the turtle.”81
Following this line of thought, things get really interesting in relation to the American Dream,
when Burns suggests that Steinbeck due to his feelings for the land and his sympathy for the
agrarian farmers could not see the implication of his own story:
“Steinbeck demonstrates himself a writer highly reflective of the American culture. Like
him, American society has never been able to integrate or resolve its contradictory impulse to
admire the self-reliant man, while at the same time it pressures him to conform or, at the least,
to be considerate of the needs and wishes of his fellow men. Individualism is not compatible
with cooperation.”82
3.3.4. The dark side to Steinbeck’s vision
While some, like Hunter, read the closing chapters of Grapes and walked away with the
encouraging impression that no matter what, the people endures and carries on, plenty have also
come away with the more pessimistic impression that Steinbeck really wanted people to be aware
that something was wrong with the country. Between the fact that Steinbeck seemed to champion
labour unions as part of the solution to the problem, and the fact that you could read him like Burns
does, as one that criticises the American Dream of the self-reliant individual, it is not surprising that
Grapes caused uproar upon its release, leading several to denounce him as a communist
sympathiser. His fellow Californians were outraged by his depiction of them, and the state even
hired writers to compose works to contradict Grapes and save the state’s face in the view of the
nation. In the essay “California Answers The Grapes of Wrath” Professor in English at San Jose
State University, Susan Shillinglaw, recounts this detail, noting that the counter-efforts all shared
81
82
Burns in Davis, 1982, page 102
Burns in Davis, 1982, page 104
41
“an idealism that is far from ridiculous. It is staunchly American. Theirs is the faith in
individual initiative. Theirs is the belief in land ownership, in the virtues of the yeoman
farmer”83
The solutions that were offered by the state and by the Californians and championed by their
propaganda writers were largely insufficient however, as Steinbeck shows us with the Joads’ time in
the overburdened state-sponsored immigrant camp, and as Shillingshaw notes, the measures were:
“Band-Aids, and the wound continues to fester”84
In another essay: “Come Back to the Boxcar, Leslie Honey: Or Don’t Cry for Me, Madonna,
Just Pass The Milk” – found along with Shillinglaw’s essay in Critical Insights – John Steinbeck
(2011) by editor Don Noble – Professor in American Literature at the University of Florida John
Seelye is out to defend Grapes against charges of over-use of sentimentality. He concludes that
while Grapes is a highly emotional book, its emotion is anger. Steinbeck was angry with the
injustice he has witnessed in the migrant camps of California, and he sought to move the American
people to action, because he:
“saw in the anger of farm workers in California the seeds of a war, a populist uprising
[…]
It is to say that The Grapes of Wrath is a text that, like Luther’s, is pinned to the gates of
Heaven that something had better be done or else.”85
And while Seelye goes on to note that the conflict was eventually worked out with the arrival
of a different war – World War II – as jobs suddenly became available in armament factories and
land suddenly became available when it was seized from resident Japanese minorities, the questions
suddenly challenging the American Dream of individualism arising from The Grapes of Wrath
remain. If Hunter is right, and Americans must learn to sacrifice for the community to prosper, then
does this spell an end to the prominence of personal liberty in the American Dream? Or is it, as
Burns seems to think, a problem that has continually haunted the dream and one that is likely to
keep doing so in the future?
83
Shillinglaw in Noble, 2011, page 192
Shillinglaw in Noble, 2011, page 192
85
Seelye in Noble, 2011, page 172
84
42
4. On the Road
4.1. Background
At this point we have spent time investigating the dreams of Americans who had almost
everything and were at liberty to do as they pleased and the dreams of Americans who had almost
nothing and whose every move was dictated to them forces beyond their control. For our third and
final inquiry, we shall look at the dreams of a curious group of Americans: ones who had homes and
means yet decided to go and live like homeless vagrants on the roads of America. A story of such
people was written by Jean-Louis ‘Jack’ Kerouac (1922-1969) in one furious stretch in April of
1951, then re-written and edited several times over before finally getting published in 1957. The
book was the second in a line of semi-autobiographical books that Kerouac would write over the
span of his career, and considered as his best work the novel would make him the primary novelist
of the so-called ‘Beat generation’ which he himself was part of and helped define.
Kerouac himself was born in Lowell, Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents. His older
brother by five years, Gérard, died at the age of nine, and the loss troubled Kerouac greatly and is
considered as having inspired his writing throughout his life. A talented athlete, Kerouac eventually
went to Columbia University on a football scholarship, and during World War II he alternatively
played football and shipped out with the Merchant Marine. At Columbia he would meet William S.
Burroughs (1914-1997) and Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) who would come to start the ‘Beat
generation’ with him. The three of them got involved in the murder trial against their friend Lucien
Carr (1925-2005) and Kerouac was detained as a material witness. This dismayed his father who
refused to bail him out, so Kerouac accepted an offer from the family of his girlfriend of then, Edie
Parker (1923-1993), who promised to bail him out if he would marry Edie. After getting out and
marrying Edie, Kerouac started writing The Town And The City (1950) hoping to prove to his father
that he could become a serious writer, but his father died of stomach cancer, with one of his last
actions being asking Jack to take care of his mother.
Shortly after Kerouac would meet Neal Cassady (1926-1986) with whom he would go
adventuring across the North American continent and who would become the main inspiration for
both On the Road and much of Kerouac’s other writing. It was him who inspired Kerouac to write
autobiographically about his own experiences and it was this method that prompted Kerouac to
write the original version of On the Road in one stretch on connected sheets of paper (this version
43
thus became known as ‘The Scroll’). Upon its publication it became an instant success, propelling
Kerouac to widespread fame and making him a spokesperson of a beat fad that soon would change
radically from his original visions, prompting him to more or less disown it for large parts of his
remaining career – A career that ended when Kerouac died in October of 1969 as a result of long
time alcoholism.86
4.2. Summary
The story of On the Road follows Kerouac’s own character Salvatore Paradise from he meets
Cassady’s character Dean Moriarty in New York in 1947, and over the next three years as Sal lives
his ‘life on the road’ taking several cross-continent road trips with Dean, the two of them travelling
mostly for reasons that are just excuses for them to go for the sake of going.
Upon their first meeting, Sal is impressed with Dean and finds that his excitement makes him
more interesting than many of Sal’s New York friends, so when Dean leaves for Denver, Sal
eventually decides to go on a road trip after him, hitchhiking and bus riding. He finds Dean and
other friends in Denver where they all party for a while. Eventually Sal takes the bus to San
Francisco, where he had planned to get work on a ship and sail the pacific. He meets his friend
Remi however, who sets him up with a job as a night watchman, but Sal does not keep it long,
leaving instead for Los Angeles. On the way he meets a Mexican girl named Terry, and he goes to
live with her among Mexican cotton pickers for a while. Eventually this too does not fit Sal, so he
leaves Terry and takes the bus back to New York.
The following year, Sal is in Virginia spending Christmas with family when Dean – having left
a wife, Camille, and their daughter Amy in San Francisco – shows up with his girlfriend Mary Lou
and his and Sal’s friend Ed Dunkel. Sal decides to go on the road again, and the four of them go to
New York to party with friends, and here Dean wants Sal to have sex with Mary Lou while he
himself watches. Sal declines however, and soon the four of them drive down to New Orleans,
where they stay for a while with their morphine addicted friend Old Bull Lee and his wife. Ed’s
wife comes to find him, and Sal, Dean and Mary Lou move on, headed for San Francisco where
Dean promptly leaves Mary Lou to be with Camille. Mary Lou stays briefly with Sal, telling him
that Dean will always leave when it suits him. When she leaves, Sal is left alone for a time,
wandering San Francisco having visions of past lives until Dean finds him again. Sal goes to live
86
Section generally references Theado, 2000, pages 9-26
44
with Dean and Camille for a while, and the two men explore the night clubs and jazz concerts of the
city, but Sal eventually jumps on the bus back to New York again, feeling like he accomplished
nothing with the trip overall.
In 1949 Sal feels lonely, so he goes to Denver looking for friends to party with but finds that
nobody he knows is there. Consequently he goes to San Francisco to see Dean again. Here Camille
is pregnant again, and she throws Dean out, and several of their friends are generally sick of Dean.
So Sal and Dean set off for New York again, with dreams to travel to Italy together. The two share
crazy conversations on the trip, but also a harsh argument over Sal’s age. They drive a Cadillac at
blazing speeds to Chicago and then move on to Detroit where Dean hopes to find his hobo father.
He never does however, so they soon move on back to New York, where they party and where the
plans about Italy are neglected as Dean meets a girl called Inez and also gets her pregnant.
The next year Sal feels like travelling again, while Dean is settled down for the moment with
Inez. Sal goes to Denver again where he meets Stan Shephard, and while the two of them are
planning a trip to Mexico they learn that Dean has spent his savings on a car and is on his way to
join them. Together the three of them drive deep down into Mexico, where their money buys them
cheap, hazy adventures with alcohol, marijuana and prostitutes. They end up in Mexico City where
Sal gets seriously ill with dysentery. Dean however, leaves without waiting for Sal to get better,
which leads Sal to realise what a poor friend he is.
In the final part of the book, Dean has divorced Camille to marry Inez, yet leaves Inez to go
back to Camille. Sal has recovered and returned to New York where he has now met a girl called
Laura, with whom he plans to move to San Francisco. Dean arrives but Sal feels like their life on
the road together is over, so he denies Dean a ride and drives off with Laura without him. Sal
proceeds to move on with his life along a seemingly more sensible path while Dean is left sticking
to his ways and his messes.87
4.3. Analysis
While there is an argument to be had over whether or not On the Road is actually a Great
American Novel, due to its being a largely auto-biographical account of Sal/Kerouac and
Dean/Cassady’s real life experiences as opposed to the carefully crafted fictions of Gatsby and
Grapes for instance, it would be hard to argue that it does not have something to say about a
87
Section generally references Kerouac, 1959
45
generation of Americans and their dreams. As professor in English at Gardner-Webb University in
North Carolina Matt Theado remarks in his book Understanding Jack Kerouac (2000):
“Although Kerouac’s book concerns the lives and times of those who made up the Beat
Generation, the book is really about the pursuit of the American Dream in post–World War II
society by several individuals seeking to be unfettered by conformism, materialism, and
general social paranoia. As a new world power in the cold war era, some observers felt that
America had come to exert a restraining force on the individual freedom of its own citizens.”88
Those who made up the Beat Generation, before the term was appropriated by a generation of
pseudo-poetic slackers that Kerouac himself would disapprove of (“[beat] was thereafter picked up
by the West Coast leftist groups and turned into… all that nonsense”89), were initially William S.
Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac himself, who explains the term as
such:
“The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and
Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties and early fifties, of a generation of
crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly riding and roaming America, serious, curious, bumming
and hitchhiking anywhere, ragged, beatific in an ugly graceful new way – a vision gleaned
from the way we had heard the word “beat” spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in
the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America – beat, meaning
down and out but full of intense conviction … It never meant juvenile delinquent, it meant
characters of special spirituality who didn’t gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out
the dead wall wind of our civilization – the subterranean heroes who’d finally turned from the
“freedom” machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight,
experiencing a “derangement of the senses,” talking strange, being poor, and glad,
prophesying a new style for American culture”90
4.3.1. The white negro and dreaming of Dean
In the entry “The Beats and the 1960s” in The Cambridge History of the American Novel,
professor in Literature at the University of Claremont, California Robert Faggen explains how the
beats’ common way of understanding connected them deeply to jazz music and to black culture,
88
Theado, 2000, page 23
Kerouac in Theado, 2000, page 25
90
Kerouac in Cambridge, 2011, page 910
89
46
referring to a Norman Mailer (1923-2007) essay from 1959 called “The White Negro” which gives
the description of
“[…] the Beat and the hipster as American existentialists keyed into the fear of instant
death from either the atom bomb or slow death from conformity or genocide.”91
According to Mailer, “the white negro” was one who had to:
“[…] live with death as immediate danger, to divorce himself from society, to exist without
roots, to set out on the uncharted journey with the rebellious imperatives of the self”92
These descriptions and definitions owe a large part of their origin to the exploits of Sal and
Dean in On The Road, for such is indeed the way the two live as they travel America throughout the
story. Like the pioneers of older times, Sal more than once sets off with Dean in a wide-eyed quest
for the West coast, yet while they share this sort of dream of the opposite coast, we also get the idea
that Sal/Kerouac is dreaming of Dean/Cassady in a sense similar to how Nick Carraway ‘dreams’ of
Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. Faggen notes how Kerouac saw himself as behind or inferior to
Ginsberg and Cassady, and like his character Sal, his role was one of following these madmen on
their adventures to remember them and write them down. Theado adds that while Kerouac’s other
friends were all intellectuals or criminals bent on criticising American culture, Cassady had an
addictive enthusiasm for life and was able to throw himself into adventures with “a wild yea-saying
overburst of American joy”93. Despite his admiration of Cassady/Dean however, and despite the
fact that Kerouac/Sal takes part in many of his adventures with women, Sal consistently wishes for
a wife to eventually settle down with, while Dean shows no sign of slowing down even after several
marriages and children.
“Yet the hero of On The Road is really Dean, the one who cuts closest to reality, who is
utterly involved in his life as he lives it, who moves in the rhythm from moment to moment,
admonishing his friends to forgive and forget, to understand that, in his often repeated motto,
“Everything is always all right!” Sal rarely achieves this level of detachment; implicit in the
story is the notion that his eye roves not solely for “eyeball kicks” but for details to record in
his book.”94
91
Faggen in Cambridge, 2011, page 912
Mailer quoted in Cambridge, 2011, page 912
93
Theado, 2000, page 19
94
Theado, 2000, page 63
92
47
As readers of Gatsby it is hard then to not start here already with comparing the fascinations of
relatively cautious Kerouac and Nick with the boundless accomplishments and desires of Dean and
Gatsby – a comparison that only gains depth from the observation that both Dean and Gatsby
essentially use their friends in their efforts to grasp after dreams that are ever beyond their reach. It
would seem the motif is repeated, of a narrator anchored somewhat in reality, observing the life of a
dreamer with no such anchoring.
4.3.2. The road as the new frontier
Another theme we have seen before, this one in The Grapes of Wrath, is that the Americans are
continuously looking for opportunity on new frontiers. Cullen’s pioneers looked for it in the west,
and so did Steinbeck’s Joads, even if Burns suggested they should have looked for it in the city
instead. In the essay “Free Ways and Straight Roads: The Interstates of Sal Paradise and 1950s
America” by Lars Erik Larson, professor in English at the University of Portland, Oregon (which
we find in What’s Your Road, Man? Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac’s On The Road by Hilary
Holladay and Robert Holton, both professors in English at the University of Massachusetts and the
Carleton University, Ottawa respectively) it is suggested that the American roads are the new
frontier to Kerouac:
“What the existing interstate highways signify for the young narrator Sal Paradise, and
what has led On The Road to be regarded as a kind of quintessential American road text, is
their promise of new frontiers for personal desire. Kerouac presents their Dionysian qualities
in many forms, including ecstasies of expression, conduct, sexuality and race.”95
The road is a place of opportunity, as opposed to Sal’s home life, which is dominated by a
triviality in which Sal struggles to feel content. In this juxtaposition the square ordinary life at home
indeed seems like Mailer noticed, “a slow death from conformity”. The rest of American society is
turning its economy from production to consumption, fostering the very decadence and conformity
that Cullen observed were the dark sides of the American dreams of home ownership and lives of
leisure, and while the commercialisation took place along the roads of the country as well, Larson
notes that Sal and Dean manage to blaze by it in a blur, travelling at high speeds and with hardly
any money.
95
Larson in Holladay, Holton, 2009 page 38
48
Dean’s obsession with ‘going’ is an effect of him observing these possibilities. To him, the
roads are his home. Rather than dream of owning a conventional home, Dean cherishes the freedom
of being able to go anywhere and be anyone at any given time. Living this way, he is – as Mailer
suggests a true Beat must – divorcing himself from the restraints of society.
“We see Dean’s dream of the highway’s permissive pluralism in his question, “What’s your
road, man? –holyboy road, mad-man road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an
anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body now?” This cryptic vision sets up the road as
catering to difference along axes of divinity, sanity, hue and species”96
By living on the road, Sal and Dean find a place of freedom in which they can renegotiate the
boundaries of society according to their own progressive American dream – something that might
had been necessary for them, as Larson points out the underlying hints of bisexual tension in the
pair “at a time when Americans still thought of homosexuality as a psychological disease”.97 In
“Dedicated to America, Whatever That Is” by R. J. Ellis, department head of American and
Canadian studies at the University of Birmingham, a comparative reading of On The Road in both
its ‘scroll’ version, the revised version as well as Kerouac’s Visions Of Cody (1972) reveals that
during Sal and Dean’s encounter with an unnamed ‘fag’, Sal actually witnesses Dean having sex
with him98 (this is written out in the scroll version and in Visions Of Cody, but in the edited version
of On The Road, Sal is in the bathroom while it happens99). On their interstate playground they
would be free to explore such curiosities, and more extreme ones too it is pointed out when Dean
turns a paedophilic gaze on a 13 year old girl.100
For all the freedom and allure of the road however, Larson notes that Sal’s high expectations
for his trips with Dean always turn into disappointment when he reaches the distant coast. Over the
course of the book he comes to romanticise the land and its roads and the idea of travelling it, yet he
also comes to realise that “the west […] turns out to have the same sadness as the east”101¸ and
even the trip to Mexico on which he seeks to escape this notion, he ends up sick and just wanting to
96
Larson in Holladay, Holton, 2009 page 42
Larson in Holladay, Holton, 2009 pages 43-44
98
Ellis in Holladay, Holton, 2009 pages 121-122
99
Kerouac, 1959, page 121
100
Kerouac, 1959, page 126
101
Larson in Holladay, Holton, 2009 page 47
97
49
go home. On The Road then sees a change in the perspective on ‘the road’, and as Sal passes out
during his and Dean’s mad ride to Chicago102 he experiences a loss of control that is:
“Sal’s experience of the apocalyptic extremes of the American road’s freedom”.103
By eventually turning his back on his “road life” and opting to commit to his relationship with
Laura, Sal’s transformation is complete, and with it the book’s depiction of two contrasting points
of view: one glorifying the road as a new frontier of freedom and one reasserting the value in
normative relationships and stable social structures. Ellis suggests that “At the core of Sal’s
response is a deep-seated ambiguity about the United States” 104 , and as Larson sees it, this is
among the foremost features of the book: namely that it holds on to:
“a tense balance in a multiplicity of desires for liberation and containment, offering a kind
of libidinal economy for a divided nation”105
The curious word for us to notice here is economy, as it points us back to Burns’ reading of
Steinbeck, and his conclusion that the individual’s freedom always comes at the price of his relation
to those around it.
4.3.3. Back and forth between individual and society
By now we are clearly beginning to see a pattern solidifying, with the concerns for the
individual and concerns for the community pulling in separate directions. From The Grapes of
Wrath we got the idea that people needed to be less individual and move towards more of a spirit of
community, yet in “The Makings Of Paradise” professor in English at the University of Nebraska,
Michael Skau suggests Kerouac’s On The Road tells us that after the war America had come too far
and the individual needed to come back into focus again:
“The Beat Generation emerged in a world whose values had been turned upside down. It
was the first generation to experience a relentless threat of global nuclear destruction, to be
spoon-fed on organized violations of free will as brainwashing, cybernetics and motivational
research. The result was a conviction that the personal identity of the individual was besieged;
therefore the integrity of that identity must be preserved at all costs. For Sal Paradise of On the
Road, that means a quest for the idiosyncratic and often ambivalent identification of selfhood
102
Kerouac, 1959, page 136
Larson in Holladay, Holton, 2009 page 51
104
Ellis in Holladay, Holton, 2009 page 132
105
Larson in Holladay, Holton, 2009 page 54
103
50
and nostalgia for the security and irresponsibility of childhood in a world that seems to
promise only the guarantees of aging and mortality.”106
The Beats then, according to Skau, are about casting off conventional values and aspirations so
as to not be weighed down by the expectations of society around them, striving instead to be present
in the moment, and in making themselves the centre of each moment. They seek to deny whatever
identity has been forced upon them and go out into the world hoping to find an identity of their
own.
As Sal seems to realise as On the Road progresses however, the answer to who he is, is hardly
to be found dangling off the end of excessive beat lifestyle. The ambiguity that Ellis identifies in Sal
and that Larson finds in On the Road at large is by Skau seen to come from Sal/Kerouac
experiencing both the ordered life of home and the chaotic life of the road and eventually coming
up unsatisfied with both. The reason he thinks, is that Kerouac is obsessed with youth, as is
reflected in the only time that Sal gets mad at Dean in On the Road which, despite the latter’s
general faithlessness and outrageous behaviour, is when he makes a remark about Sal, his senior by
a few years, growing older.107 Kerouac wants to keep himself in mind as young because he wants a
young perspective on the world
“Another manifestation of the identity problem in Kerouac’s novels involves the
idealization of childhood and the reluctance to surrender the innocence and the imaginative
liberty of childhood. A focus on childhood has always been popular with American writers,
perhaps in part because America itself is often imagined as a child or adolescent, born of
dreams of freedom and innocence, bursting with energy, vitality, curiosity, and idealism,
reluctant to relinquish its naïve visions even after attaining the maturity of major power status.
America remains endearingly and exasperatingly youthful, and Americans dare to share this
quality with their country–often desperately.
Kerouac’s novels document the American dream of youth, the loss of these dreams, and an
attempt to regain the charm of youth.”108
Considering Sal’s eventual choice to reject Dean and commit to Laura then, the questions of
interpretation then becomes what exactly is happening with Sal as he matures to do so. Does the
106
Skau in Holladay, Holton, 2009 pages 155-156
Kerouac, 1959, page 123
108
Skau in Holladay, Holton, 2009 pages 159-160
107
51
rejection of Dean mean that Kerouac sees his adventuring days as having been fruitless? Does On
the Road – despite Skau’s reading of it as a story about the hunt for the identity of the individual –
eventually suggest – like our Steinbeck reader Burns – that Americans must eventually grow out of
their dreams of individuality? Is there, as Larson suggests a balancing of the beat contra
conventional lifestyles, so as to point out that each has both flaws and merits, yet neither is perfect
and one must choose for oneself? Or is there perhaps a more complex understanding at hand, in
which Sal’s initial rejection of conformity and subsequent experiences with Beat life affords him the
freedom and perspective to finally come full circle and commit to a life of stability which is at least
of his own choosing, as opposed to being forced upon him by convention?
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5. Conclusion
To begin to form a conclusions to our forays into three of America’s great classics, we start by
briefly recounting the American Dreams of each and how each of those dreams were treated in the
respective stories.
In The Great Gatsby, the title character dreams to escape the boundaries of an America society
that is still very much divided by economic classes. Gatsby wants to improve himself, transcending
his low birth as great Americans like Lincoln once did, yet while he initially makes headway
through the newfound meritocracy established by the American military of World War I, his return
from the war sees him turn his talents to crime as he amasses great wealth from working as a
bootlegger.
His rise to riches and stature is thus a fake one, and it is perhaps for this reason that he, despite
having learned how to act rich, does not feel comfortable or at ease. Influenced by the military’s
attempt to recast American men as defenders of chastity, Gatsby longs to be reunited with the love
of his youth Daisy, possibly also because Daisy as a true high born lady, would validate Gatsby’s
position as a man of stature should he win her hand. Gatsby’s dream of being with Daisy is partly
his motivation for turning to crime to become rich enough to be suited for her, and it is what also
leads him to pursuing an affair with her, despite her being married to another man.
From a distance, the events are observed by Daisy’s cousin and Gatsby’s friend Nick, who
admires the purity of Gatsby’s dreams of both love and accomplishments, yet also notices firstly
that Daisy is by no means so noble as to be worth Gatsby’s affections, secondly that Gatsby’s
dreams has lead him into a state of decadence, and thirdly that Gatsby, despite all of his efforts,
eventually dies protecting Daisy and has no visitors but his father and Nick to show for it.
Gatsby is the wide-eyed dreamer who lives according to his lofty goals and ideals. Nick is the
hesitant observer, who admires Gatsby yet fears to break conventions to pursue an equally free life
himself. Tom is the villain, the oppressor of Daisy and Gatsby’s freedom and the conservative
defender of the established order. The allocation of roles as well as the events of the story allow us
to see that even the biggest and most noble of dreams can lead us to a fall if we lose touch with
reality, yet without these same dreams we are condemned to living unsatisfactory lives like those of
the Nick, Tom and Daisy.
53
Moving on to The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family here has to endure biblical ordeals when
they are thrown off their family land by a banking system that has clearly outgrown early American
dreams. They are believers in the old American dream of free, self-reliant homeowners, and yet in
Steinbeck’s book we see that time is sweeping their kind aside, and that only those that can adapt
will survive. The Joads and the people like them must learn to look outside not just themselves
individually, but also outside of their families, embracing a sense of community with all around
them, to make it during one of the hardest economic crises of America’s history. And even as they
learn their lesson, we see that prospects look slim for them and furthermore we question, what is the
cost to America’s Dreams, should we agree with Steinbeck’s morals? Does the work for freedom,
equality and the opportunity to pursue happiness for all, really mean that we must sacrifice the
individual, or conversely, must we learn that an individual like the mechanically talented Al Joad
can only survive if he truly separates his own efforts from those of everybody else, including his
family?
On the Road seems to suggest that ten years later the climate has changed to the opposite, with
people living anonymous lives behind rows of picket fences or cold apartment windows.
Contentment and conformity are robbing the Americans of their individual identities and so Sal and
Dean set out as pioneers of the Beat Generation, to re-find a frontier on the American highways on
which men can free themselves from society’s expectations, experiment, become present in the
moment and finally discover who they are. As exciting as the idea seems however, we soon see that
Dean appears more in the process of losing any firm concept of self and Sal’s adventures with Beat
life at best gives him the perspective to return to an appreciation of conventional life. As in The
Great Gatsby we see an insatiable dreamer in Dean, who leads his more cautious friend Sal to great
ideas and insights, yet as the novel trails off with Dean seemingly cursed to forever chase his
Dreams, it is Sal’s connection to normal life that – if we take a positive outlook – allows him to
combine his insights and his innocence with a more mature perspective that allows him to step back
from mere dream chasing, to rather make an attempt at a progressive, constructive life.
Taking a step back to fit all these dreams and their implications in frame, two omnipresent
considerations seem to remain. Firstly: dreams are dreams and stay dreams exactly because they
will never be fully realised, and those who lose touch with reality and their surroundings while
chasing their dreams, will seem – as Gatsby and Dean – like idealists who appear to be every bit as
cursed as they are fascinating. Secondly: that dreams can still be beneficial, because they lead
people to adventures and drive them to accomplishments, and without the dreamers a nation like
54
America would soon be reduced to a population apathetic, conservative, conform and fearful.
Furthermore, daring to dream from time to time might even provide invaluable perspective for
when one eventually seeks to consolidate one’s dreams with one’s life in reality, as we can imagine
a man like Sal Paradise embracing his eventual ‘home life’ with much more awareness than a man
doing so without having had the experiences Sal has.
This awareness, of the importance and quality of big dreams, is what this paper eventually
suggests to be the likely root of the surrounding world’s fascination with America. Especially those
of us who come from Denmark must see the sharp contrast between the concept of their American
Dream and our entirely opposite “Law of Jante” (“Janteloven”) – a list of rules recognised by many
Scandinavians as reminders to never believe in yourself as an anything out of the ordinary.
Comparatively the American Dream, even for its vagueness, its susceptibility to change and its
potential for deluding its most fanatic believers, seems an inspirational force of reverse gravity, that
will always exist in the heart of the American people, suggesting they should strive to refine their
understanding of the values in their creed – these liberty, justice, equality and the pursuit of
happiness – and strive to always improve. As our American friend Cullen elaborately puts it towards
the end of his work with the dream:
“The real problem is that any American Dream is finally too incomplete a vessel to
contain longings that elude human expression or comprehension. We never reach the Coast we
think we see. Still we go on dreaming. Even those of us who have the means and desire to
pursue their dreams finally have no power over what they happen to be: dreams usually come
to us unbidden and are not typically practical or easy to achieve (otherwise they wouldn’t be
dreams). What makes the American Dream American is not that our dreams are any better,
worse, or more interesting than anyone else’s, but that we live in a country constituted of
dreams, whose very justification continues to rest on it being a place where one can, for better
and worse, pursue distant goals.”109
If there’s one conclusion to all this discussion over dreams then, it is that by making their
ideals into dreams – speaking of them as having dream-like qualities – the Americans and their
authors have made sure that there is always something just outside of their reach that pulls them
forward – Something that encourages them to strive for improvements and to never be arrested by
difficult moral dilemmas, ambiguities or paradoxes. Like Martin Luther King did, it is better to
109
Cullen, 2003, 182
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dream big and come up big even as you come up short, than to let the elusiveness and difficulty of a
dream make you deny it or deter you from extending yourself towards it.
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6. References

Cassuto, Leonard (ed), The Cambridge History of The American Novel, Cambridge University
Press, 2011

Cullen, Jim: The American dream: a short history of an idea that shaped a nation, Oxford
University Press, 2003

Davis, Robert Con: Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Grapes Of Wrath, Prentice-Hall,
1982

Donaldson, Scott: Critical Essays On Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Boston : G. K. Hall, 1984

Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Key: The Great Gatsby, 1925, Republished by Penguin Books in
1994

Holladay, Hillary and Holton, Robert: What’s Your Road Man – Critical Essays On Jack
Kerouac’s On The Road, Southern Illinois University Press 2009

Kerouac, Jack: On The Road, The Viking Press, 1959

Noble, Don: Critical Insights – John Steinbeck, Salem Press 2011

Salzman, Jack (ed), The Cambridge Handbook of American Literature, Cambridge University
Press, 1986

Steinbeck, John: Grapes Of Wrath, 1939
http://www.tiengiang.edu.vn/FileUpload/Vanban/File8128.pdf - 14 August 2012

Stoneley, Peter and Weinstein, Cindy (eds). A Concise Companion to American Fiction 1900–
1950. Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Blackwell Reference Online. 10 August 2012
http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/book?id=g9781405133678_9781405133678
Page numbers referencing this source are the numbers of the pages of Chapter 7 only, seeing as
the online version of the title does not display page numbers unless each chapter is downloaded
individually.

Theado, Matt: Understanding Jack Kerouac, University Of South Carolina, 2000

Meyer, Michael J. and Railsback, Brian: A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia, Greenwood Press,
2006
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