Bricklayer's Boy Analysis

The American dream was an idea that everyone had the equal opportunity to achieve success through the works of determination, hard work, and initiative. We can see in The Mason and Bricklayer’s boy, expresses the hard work and determination of both Bates and Lubrano’s father had to go through by being long-term blue-collar bricklayers in order for their sons to become “office” white-collar workers representing the achievement of the American dream. In The Mason interview of Carl Murray Bates, interviewed by Studs Terkel, the story expresses Bates’s passion for stone ever since he was a 17-year old boy. Bates first talks about his passion for stone by expressing the long history of the art form, where stone mason goes way back before the time of the bible and the pyramids of Egypt while still using the same sorts of methods to masonry to-this-day. He also expresses the fact that machinery couldn't get into the bricklaying industry because the art form was too …show more content…
The story starts off explaining their lifestyle where his father works as a bricklayer outside the fields of Columbia University making campus buildings and Lubrano studying indoors at the university. Lubrano’s father never wanted to become a blue-collar worker bricklaying buildings because he didn’t have a passion for the job but rather wanted to become a singer and actor when he was younger but his family needed money so he had to throw away his dream. However, Lubrano’s father didn't want his children to end up working blue-collared jobs but actually wanted them to achieve the American dream by becoming successful working white-collared indoors jobs. When Lubrano expressed his news to his father of becoming a newspaper journalism, his father expresses concern for his child because be believes that journalism is considered a dying field compared to other sorts of jobs that would pay