The Pursuit Of The American Dream

To some extent, the pursuit of hopes and dreams is a method of escaping the realities of everyday life for characters from both texts. In Kerouac’s novel, the dreams of where the road might take them provide an escape for both Sal and Dean from a mundane East Coast lifestyle, and a way to forget the mistakes of the past. Similarly in Thompson’s piece, a voyage of revelation fueled by an underlying desire to understand the American Dream offers a chance to escape for Raoul and his attorney using somebody else’s money. Jack Kerouac employs a proper noun in the utterance
Here, the West is presented as a symbol of great opportunity and freedom like it had been for the pioneers who settled there from America’s east and across the world over a century …show more content…
Kerouac employs a metaphor and grammatical repetition in the declarative “the abstract noun “call” and concrete noun “horizon” here present a hopeful new beginning for Sal and a fundamental change in how he will live his life. This is what Dean offers at the start of the book to Sal, an opportunity to leave his life as a newly-divorced and miserable man in the East behind and escape to what is hoped to be a better life in the West. Dean’s use of grammatical repetition in the utterance presents the excitement brought on by the allure of the adventures that await once they get out on the road, and the promise of a better life thereafter. This is to show how to truly live you must break free from the shackles of conventionality and day-to-day life, and that the world is rife with opportunities for those who can achieve such …show more content…
For Dean, being on the road is a way to achieve his ambitions of achieving as many sexual encounters as he can, with Moriarty growing increasingly sexually sybaritic throughout the book. Similarly but in a far less literal sense than Kerouac, Thompson uses personification in a sexual metaphor of his own when Duke is wandering through at 4:30 AM he notes that the gamblers are. This use of vulgar colloquialism indicates how with a luck America will provide the economic and social success that is wish for. These people hope that gambling will be a way to achieve the American Dream through winning big and getting rich, their chance of weakening their finances however are greater. In contrast with Sal’s attainable and clear spiritual search on his journey, Raoul’s quest for the specific whereabouts of the American Dream concludes with a further metaphor used in Las Vegas when Raoul states that The concrete noun “nerve” here likens the city to the body’s nervous system and Raoul hopes now that he has discovered the true physical American Dream at this location. At this point he will not let his attorney leave yet, because their expectations of the American Dream were that it would be remarkable but soon the realisation sets in that it is not as magnificent as once