The American Dream: Its Echoes and Possibilities in Literary Discourse

Abstract

The American Dream stems from the inaugural speech of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”(1941). The Four Freedoms envisaged an American society where the freedom of worship, freedom of speech, freedom of movement and the rights to life are enshrined, guaranteed, and accommodated. America has been clouded with numerous yearnings from all angles – politics, academic, economic, among other social upheavals for the enthronement of the Four Freedoms. Literary scholars have diminutively expressed the horrors of African Americans in various forms and shades, and have hopefully waited for the day it will be implemented. This paper attempts to relay the horrors, echoes, and possibilities of the American Dream as expressed by literary scholars, and the mass media. It also attempts to unveil the measures the African Americans have tried to live within the face of the horrors that have attained their existence among the White Americans. The possibilities of their struggles to live above subjugations, oppressions, the Jim Crow Laws, and racial discrimination that have rocked the American society for decades are also within the wavelength of this work.