Freedom And Selfhood In American Literature

One way to learn about the values of a society is through its literature. Some interesting values that can be gleaned from reading American literature are freedom and selfhood. At its core, freedom is the idea that an individual is free to make his or her own choices. Selfhood focuses more on individual rather than group identity. One of the main ways in which these ideas are expressed is through sleep. In American literature, the ideas of freedom and selfhood are closely related to sleep, which can be seen in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Sleep can be linked to ideas of freedom and selfhood in several ways. Thoreau explores sleep through philosophical discussion of what freedom and selfhood mean. Alexie explores how freedom and selfhood are influenced when the individual is part of a minority culture where these ideas have been lost or stolen. Bradbury looks at what freedom and selfhood mean under a dictatorship where thinking for oneself is prohibited. By using sleep in literature, these authors give the characters a platform by which he or she can dream and explore what it means to be free and what it means to have an individual identity that differs from the rest of humanity.
American author Henry David Thoreau wrote that “we must reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our