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The American Dream In The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn And Babbitt

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“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” -Eleanor Roosevelt The American Dream enshrined precisely this- the belief and faith in one’s dream that led to the fulfillment of that very dream. For some, the Dream meant the promise of social mobility while for some others it meant freedom of the physical self and of the spirit. Rooted fundamentally in the American Declaration of Independence, the American Dream originally upheld the ideals of “Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness”. However, with the passage of time, these ideals were left behind as mankind raced ahead to embrace the dazzling, dreamy future full of wealth, flamboyance and rich decadence. The values corroded and corrupted and what remained of the great American Dream was a saturated mass of nothingness that left little hope for those whose dream was far from achieved. The authors Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis depict this corruption that marred the American Dream through their works The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Babbitt. In their own ways that will be explored in this essay, the two authors critique the American Dream. While Lewis seeks to criticize the emptiness and hypocrisy in the typical middle class American way of life through the instrument of the character Babbitt, Twain’s most acclaimed novel is a comment on the disparity that exists in the realization of the American Dream. Huckleberry Finn, the protagonist in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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