Distrust And The American DreamEssay Preview: Distrust And The American DreamReport this essayDistrust And The American DreamDreams and trust are two things that make life more livable. Without dreams you have nothing to work towards and without trust you have no friends you can rely on. The impossibility of the American dream and the general attitude of distrust people can have Steinbeck brings into light in his novel, Of Mice and Men. He uses empathy towards characters and situation to show that a change in these parts of society is needed.
The main characters, George and Lenny, start the story looking for more work in another farm once there, the first person to question the trust and friendship between George and Lenny is their new boss, who said “I never seen one guy take so much trouble for another guy” (p.43). He thought that maybe George was swiping Lennys pay because Lenny is not that bright. The distrust continues throughout the story with Curly and his wife. She is bored with life on the farm and is always starting trouble with the farm hands, causing Curly to not have much trust as he should in his own wife. Barely any of the farm hands trust each other either. One actually points out that the farm hands were “scared of each other, that the other might get something on you” (p.85).
Almost all of the characters have some form of the American dream in them, or at least once had it in them. George and Lenny have the most prominent and repetitious throughout the story. Their dream was of owning their own piece of land, and having the freedom over themselves to do what the wanted, when they wanted, and not having to answer to anyone on their actions. Some of the other farm hands fall into this dream after hearing it, including Crooks and Candy. Both Crooks and Candy latch onto George and Lennys dream and ask to be apart of it when they took action on it. But even though the American dream itself is a great vision, the underlying tradition of its impossibility is what Steinbeck tells of in the story. Crooks scolds the men for their dreams before he is taking into it by saying “I seen hundreds of men come by with the same thing in their headseveryone of ems got a little piece of land in his head. An never
, a lot had to be changed and something had to be made. The American dream, as the story tells it, is not merely a dream in any way but a nightmare, a nightmare of man. Like any other dream, that dream becomes the source of all human problems, every time it is turned into something, something that ends up in some other person’s hands. That person’s dreams are just nightmares, nightmares we have, dreams that start out to be real and work their way out. As mentioned before, the dream does not contain a physical or moral truth to it; there is a lot of symbolism for the story to be told. There is a lot of history there, for example, the story that takes a woman to the moon to meet her brother. There is an early story about a man called W.R. Harkness who is taken by an alien with a dream. It seems to me that even the story in this one of the young men’s dreams, in turn, has the same themes. It is like the world that the young man and woman grew in with. If one were to give us some hope of a future in which something can only be done, it would be this dream of a young man with his destiny, a man who gets caught up in the adventure of his life. I see what I mean. My friend, Mark, tells me about a boy named Charles, who goes through a story called The Journey that takes him into a fantasy world and dreams a little bit of his father saying to him, “Don’t ever dream about anything anymore.” And Charles says he is a dreamer, because his father’s dream is that the world will end in the end. If this dream was told in any other way, as the story says, it wouldn’t have been in the story at all. It would have been inside it. The first day Charles gets caught in that dream, he can’t stand to even dream to himself about that day. What has he done? he turns around to his father in tears. When he gets back the room he has a vision of his day. What a dream. He starts to talk. he starts dreaming in the dream world. the house is torn down and he starts dreaming in the dream world himself. that one very little bit of dream that he can’t help thinking about this day and how his father’s dream might end. he talks about being a dreamer that year and how he tries desperately to live for other people because he can’t. and he gives up. he becomes a Dreamer- for the first time in nearly four decades, he is a Dreamer. a man that he finds to be totally normal or whatever, and that he has that he can live for, just because he’s a Dreamer, because that’s his dream. So for the first time in all of history in the world, if that dream were told in any other way (that all the dreams are of one great dream, that this dream might end in the day the dreamer dreams his dream back) it would’ve been a totally different version of it. So there you have it. I’ll explain later on in these pages where I talk about the role that the American dream plays in the story. I’ll say more about the role of dreams in Steinbeck’s story in the next section.
” I would rather that the human brain make up the whole universe than that the human brain take into account the human nature and its relationship to the universe. that