The American Dream

Generally considered that the American Dream consists of a healthy family, a well-paying job and a sturdy home. A lot of people dream about it and use all their opportunities to achieve it. However, the socioeconomic situation of the United States is an obstacle to this ideal. The characters who inhabit Raymond Carver’s Cathedral are blue-collar Americans confused and illusioned by the hollow image of an American dream they see on the TV screen every night. Denis Johnson’s protagonists, however, have never heard of an American dream, and are certainly not devoted to achieving it; their lives slip by a state of alcoholism and drug use and futures become brutally shapeless. Their despairs and disappointments are displaced instead through drug addiction, alcoholism, infidelity and unemployment. Nonetheless, there are rare but genuine pulses of hope in both authors’ stories. (Carvarian people find their own ways to communicate and affect each other in order to survive in this brutal world. Johnson’s character is influenced by his own experience and surroundings; his sparks of hope occur while he is on his journey to recovery.) Despite the fallacy of the American Dream, the characters of Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver have occasional moments of hope, either in the struggle to achieve the American Dream, or in spite of it.
In “A Small, Good Thing,” Carver constructs his tale around the Weiss couple: a wealthy, happy family that has been “kept away from any real harm” (Carver, 62). The Weiss couple is distinct from Carver’s typical characters in the fact that they are content and prosperous. However, their tragedy disproves that wealth and prosperity can protect one from fate. When a car strikes little Scotty on his birthday, their world falls apart. (Parents spend three days rotting away beside their son’s hospital bed, powerless.) Not only is Ann disoriented by the fact of her son being in coma, she is now terrified by some ominous voice from the phone that provokes her worst fears: “Your Scotty, I got him ready for you… Did you forget him?” (83). When she realizes that the evil person who called is a baker, Ann and Howard drive to the shopping center. Shortly after Ann breaks down and tells the baker of the death of her son, their conversation flows. As he repents and apologizes, he confesses his misgivings and loneliness: “I’m sorry for your son… I don’t have any children myself”(). He offers them a consolation for the loss of their son; they accept the bread he offers them at midnight in his bakery and talk on with him into the early morning hours drifting to the point that “they did not think of leaving” (89). Even Carvarian characters that are usually socially isolated can manage come together in this devastating grief: “You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this” (Carver, 88). “In Carver’s world, obviously liberation is not a thing one finds and secures on one’s own. It necessarily involves influence or guidance of a fellow being,” Kirk Nesset confirms (52). The conclusion to “A Small, Good Thing” is sad and quiet, but nevertheless confirms that solace is possible in the simplest act of breaking bread and relating to other humans, however oddly or ironically the circumstance occurred.
In “Fever,” philandering Eileen abandons her husband – a high school art teacher – and leaves her two young children in his unprepared care. Eileen, despite her insanity, realizes that Carlyle needs a housekeeper and a babysitter for the children. She provides the information about Mrs. Webster, who is a former helper of Richard’s mother. Since he had some disappointing experience with babysitters, he did not believe that the old woman would really be helpful. After the advent of Mrs. Webster, Carlyle’s life significantly changes: his kids emerge clean and behaved, the house is neat and the food is cooked. He later discovers in Mrs. Webster a kind of quiet dignity and supportiveness. Then the crisis begins; not only does Carlyle fell ill with flu, Mrs. Webster must move to Oregon with her husband. Carlyle breaks down; between his fevered leave of his senses and the traumas of Eileen’s foolishness he offers his confession to Mrs. Webster. He talks about the early years with Eileen, their love, and their hopes; everything that now is lost. Then and there, after finally articulating, Carlyle “understood it [the marriage] was over, and he felt able to let her go… it was something that had past” (Carver, 186). With the help of an absolutely unfamiliar person, Carlyle is able to see that his life must go on. Mrs. Webster demonstrates her belief in him, saying that he is “made out of good stuff” (185), and in her calming wisdom, confirms that he and Eileen are “both going to be okay after this is over” (185). After watching Mrs. Webster leave the house, Carlyle “turned to his children” (186). “The closing gesture implies his emergence from fever and vulnerability,” Saltzman suggests, “if only to the degree that he is able to offer himself, which is the surest sign of health Carver provides” (151). As in “A Small, Good thing”, in “Fever”, sinking people connect deeper and more movingly with near strangers, confirming that life is not over and there is always hope.
In the concluding story of the book, “Cathedral,” a narrator’s wife invites her old blind friend to stay overnight. However, the narrator is resistant to his wife’s idea. Firstly, he is ignorant about blind people, and thus feels awkward around Robert: ___ (). The narrator is also jealous that his wife preserved so much affection for a man she has not seen in ten years and had a longstanding relationship of mailed tape recordings with him. The narrator is a typical Carvarian character, emotionally isolated from others: he has no friends, hates his work, and sits in front of the television every night. He has no joys in life, except smoking pot late at night. Robert, on the other hand, is a robust, strong man with a big beard. Despite his disabilities, he feels comfortable using his fork and knife, “watching” any television program and smoking marijuana with the narrator. As they watch a late TV program about cathedrals, the narrator tries to explain what they look like to the blind man. At Robert’s suggestion they begin to draw it together on a piece of heavy paper. Here arrives a tender moment, where two men come together with pure compassion and draw the cathedral, a soaring symbol of hope. Robert sees the narrator’s potential and guides him: “Terrific. You’re doing fine” (227). With the blind man’s encouragement, the narrator realizes that he can do better in life: “His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now” (228). “A baker or an elderly babysitter or a blind man – even a fellow drunk on the road to recovery – who, entering unexpectedly into one’s life, awards new perspective or awareness to help one along, leading one, if not towards insight, then at least away from confining strictures of self,” Neset supplies (52).
In Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, the unnamed alcoholic and heroin addict narrates his life among other vagrants. He moves from place to place, looking for a dose of heroin to spare and a girl to sleep with. All characters in Jesus’ Son are spiritually sick and beaten down by a life over which they have no control. The narrator wanders from one ghetto to the next: abandoned buildings with no windows, “dirty tiny apartments” (Johnson, 34), and all sinkholes populated with losers, strung-out wasters and killers. Yet even in the worst situations, he feels flashes of hope. Jesus’ Son begins with the narrator’s journey to the unknown destination with “a Cherokee filled with bourbon” and “a VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes” (Johnson, 3). At the moment of the car crash, the narrator understands that he does not know whether he is alive or dead, because there are no values in his life. However, after confronting death, he realizes that “the great pity of a person’s life” (8) is lacking the desire to live. He looks for every echo of life, hearing it in the scream of woman who has lost her husband. When, in “Out On Bail,” the narrator realizes that one of his fellows overdoses with “stuff” (33), but that he himself has survived, he feels relieved: “he simply went under… I am still alive” (34). Thus, seeing these pulses of life, he starts his own pilgrimage from the rock bottom, tearing his way to recovery in the fierce struggle to save his own life.
Throughout his journey, the nameless narrator grows as a person who firstly can seek help and eventually find his remedy. In the opening story, the narrator is not even aware of his own quest to recovery; he is helpless himself, and as such could not conceive of being serviceable to anyone else: “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you” (10). Consequently, the narrator’s unconscious begins to nudge him towards making a change, he has dreams in which he tries “to tell someone something and they kept interrupting” (41). The narrator’s dreams confirm that some thought is forming in his mind, and there is a rising sense of urgency after a meaningless life. As he feels lonely, he starts to remember his wife and girlfriends. In the absence of any mention of his family, one presumes that the narrator have grown up without proper parenting. He seeks maternal love and support in every female figure – a nurse, a bartender, a belly dancer, or a woman with a “long red hair” (49). These archetypes are the only people that he thinks console him: “when I smiled she seemed to believe I was making advances” (54).
Later the narrator embarks on rehabilitation in the Detox. He feels very comfortable detoxing in a facility, and wonders about the meaning of life: “you could be talking, and still not be alive in a deeper sense” (108). After he learns how to live unchained by drugs and alcohol, he starts to work in a home for elderly people. He sees the spiritual dividends of his rehabilitation: “I was taking a new approach to life. I was trying to fit at work” (122). According to Milton Trachtenburg, “Sobriety is not the absence of drugs and alcohol; it is the presence of a healthy philosophy of life that is to be practiced daily” (5). Thus, the narrator shows his progress every day, by working at Beverly Home, touching society's untouchables and authoring the Beverly Home News. He recovers partially through relationships with women. However, he dates only physically disabled women, suggesting that despite his recovery and normalization in terms of work and personal upkeep, he is not ready for a life among the conventions of the American Dream. His journey is multifaceted, progressing from recovery to growth, eventually allowing him to open himself to change, define that change, and begin restructuring his values. There is a developing sense of purpose and direction in the narrator’s life. “Redemption is his acceptance of his vocation – the act of becoming a writer” (183), Robert McClure Smith says. Then the narrator concludes, "All these weirdoes, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us" (133). Finally, after the narrator is in the end of his journey, “he felt his future with his face” (81).
Life begins with hope, but for all Johnson’s characters, the hope is masked early in life by violence and chemical substances. Sometimes a simple glimpse of hope can suffice to animate the lost causes, vegetating in drugs or joyless lives. Carver’s characters angle obsessively towards the material promises of the American Dream, but find that the more qualifying abstractions do not come from a house or well-paying job. Despite all disappointments and hopelessness one must always find a beam of light that can shine even through the darkest world.

It is hard sometimes to talk and say what people really mean: either they are not skilled enough at being intimate with others, or they just feel they need to protect themselves. But in these stories there are other ways of communication. Even if the things done in stories seem to have no purpose, they help people in a very hard moment of their lives.