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AMERICAN LITERATURE
Lecture 01: Major Themes1
The Journey from Innocence to Awareness
Undoubtedly, this theme can be found in the literature of any country, not just America. Most
stories are, at their core, about such a journey. Think of almost any novel you’ve read; think of
the main character, it is likely that the protagonist/character encounters experiences that would
change him/ her in some significant way.
The journey is most important motif in American Literature. According to Emerson, “Life is
journey, not a destination”. The journey is a symbol representing a character’s adventure leading
to an epiphany, or some sort of self-realization. The journey is used to represent a mental or
physical challenge, often daunting for the characters in question who undertake it as part of their
enlightenment integral to their development. The journey can be literal, such as those in The
Road and in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or introspective, such as in To Kill a Mockingbird.
In American literature, this theme is everywhere. Hemingway’s Santiago, Arthur Miller’s John
Proctor and Biff Loman, Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, all are characters you will make this journey
from innocence to awareness. For some, as you will discover, this journey is ruinous; they are
destroyed by the experiences they encounter. For others, the journey is ultimately rewarding;
they are strengthened by their struggles.
The American Dream
Though people have come to America for a variety of reasons, most have come for opportunity.
From its very beginning, America has been viewed as a place where you can recreate yourself.
No matter who you are, there is a sense that you can come here and become something different,
something new, something better. All that is required is hard work. This has become known as
the Puritan Work Ethic—the belief that in America, hard work will be rewarded.
Initially defined as the ability to own property and earn financial independence, the American
dream has changed over centuries, and is now more closely identified with material possessions.
The modern, post-World War II version of the American dream, defined by the Oxford English
Dictionary is “the ideal that every citizen of the United States should have an equal opportunity
to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative.”
In his 1931 book The Epic of America, James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “the American
dream”, which is “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for
everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is . . . a dream of social

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The Theme is the fundamental concept/underlying message conveyed through a piece of literature, whereas
motif is a recurring idea that has a symbolic value in the text.
Theme is not explicitly given in a text, whereas motif is explicitly and repeatedly stated.
Theme is usually abstract, whereas motif is often concrete. However, an abstract theme repeatedly occurring
functions as a motif.
Four motifs are crucial to American Literature: The Sea; The Road; The Bridge; and The Frontier

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This lecture is edited, compiled and delivered by Syed Hanif Rasool, Ph.D.
syedhanifrasool@gmail.com
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order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which
they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the
fortuitous circumstances of birth or position”. Within the whole of the American psyche, there
lies an eternal hope that the nation’s citizens will be afforded the opportunity for both monetary
growth and social advancement. Of course, hard work and industriousness are embedded within
this concept: In the traditional American mindset, any man or woman can achieve whatever he
or she wants as long as there is the drive and will to obtain it.
The concept of American dream has always been an integral part within the consciousness of
Americans. In the 1776 Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson laid out what may be the
most important and well-known reference to the American dream. The Declaration maintains
that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.” Along with the other Founding Fathers, Jefferson believed that the
United States could and should be a nation giving every opportunity to individual progress and
achievement. In contrast to Great Britain and its strict class structure, the United States
represented to Jefferson the chance for all Americans, even those with poor economic
backgrounds, to become pillars of their communities.
However, not all depictions of the American dream in literature have been quite so favorable. F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) depicts the lure of the American dream as being a
destructive force rather than a beneficial one. Jay Gatsby, the novel’s main character, believes
that if he can move up in society by obtaining as much monetary wealth as possible, then he will
be able to achieve the happiness he has always desired. Unlike Franklin, Gatsby is accused of
having acquired his money through possibly disreputable means. He does not appear interested
in working hard to achieve the luxuries of money; he is instead merely
interested in obtaining the end results of actually possessing it. These materialistic values, which
he and the other characters in the novel uphold, serve to produce a general feeling of despondency
throughout the text. By the end of the novel, this despondency leads to despair, and the greed
that overruns the novel leads to Gatsby’s murder.
In a similar vein, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) is also critical of the effects the
American dream can produce in those who believe wholeheartedly in its monetary promise alone.
Like Jay Gatsby, Willy Loman, the play’s protagonist, is obsessed with making money. In the
end, Miller’s depiction of the quest for the American dream is even more somber than is
Fitzgerald’s: Willy kills himself, while his son Happy decides to follow along in his father’s
footsteps, avenging what he sees as the wrongs society enacted against Willy. Miller believes
that what he views as the treacherous myth of the American dream will continually perpetuate
itself, relentlessly casting its dark shadow on future generations of young Americans.
Yet it can easily be argued that those who feel slighted by the promise of the American dream
the most are minority groups—those who have been constantly disenfranchised by the American
governmental system and who have been forced to view the hypocrisy they see as inherent within
the Dream their entire lives. In his famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, the African-American
civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that his hope for the equality of all races in
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This lecture is edited, compiled and delivered by Syed Hanif Rasool, Ph.D.
syedhanifrasool@gmail.com
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America was one “deeply rooted in the American dream.” King believed that all Americans should
be provided the opportunity to prosper to their fullest potential.
Much like King, the Harlem Renaissance poet, Langston Hughes also lamented that minority
groups were never given the opportunity to experience the hope the American dream supposedly
provides to its nation’s citizens. In “Let America Be America Again,” Hughes juxtaposes the
image of what privileged white Americans envision their country to be with his own experience
in the country as an African-American citizen, remarking that “America never was America to
me” (l. 5). Likewise, in his 1951 poem “Harlem,” Hughes asks the question, “What happens to a
dream deferred?” (l.1), ultimately suggesting that minority groups are denied the realization of
their dreams in America.
Further, in his short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), the
Native American writer Sherman Alexie shows that, like African Americans, Native Americans
experience the idea of the American dream in a unique way. Unlike other minority groups, Native
Americans are left out of the American dream because the ideal of white prosperity and
“industriousness” led to the destruction and seizing of what was once Indian property and land.
Rather than simply being unattainable, the American dream in this case takes on an even more
sinister connotation.
Overall, whether they realize it or not, the American dream remains a fundamental factor in most
Americans’ lives. Self-fulfillment through monetary satisfaction and whether or not that
satisfaction was gained through sufficient hard work is constantly debated and discussed in the
media, at neighbor’s houses, and over coffee with friends. Literature is just one venue Americans
use to determine their own successes and the successes of those around them. Just as Willy
Loman passed on his way of viewing the world to his son Happy, the lens that the idea of the
American dream provides will continue to sustain itself for countless future generations of
American citizens. Also the American dream has come under close scrutiny, as writers burrow
beneath the surface of accepted conventions to reveal uncomfortable truths. Again and again,
writers have probed the American Dream and shown it to be little more than an illusion—hollow,
deceptive, even destructive.
Childhood
In 1960, the French historian Philippe Ariès advanced the hypothesis that the idea of childhood
was practically nonexistent before the early modern period. The controversy about the existence
or absence of the idea prior to that time in history gave rise to a host of studies on childhood. But
what does the word childhood mean? Our awareness that it refers to a distinct period of human
life is natural, but how do we determine its duration? How long does childhood last? Many
psychologists and specialists in children’s studies conclude that childhood
is an endlessly complex term. All have agreed that it refers to a set of experiences and behaviors,
characteristic for the earlier part of our lives, meant to prepare us for adulthood and active life.
As to its duration, individual differences should be taken into account. In this sense, childhood is
defined in opposition to adulthood: One is no longer a child when one becomes an adult. However,
this theory has not sufficed, and the growth of research on the subject is telling. The common
denominator of many studies on childhood is the attempt to grasp its essence, to define the
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This lecture is edited, compiled and delivered by Syed Hanif Rasool, Ph.D.
syedhanifrasool@gmail.com
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experience of being a child and to explain the nature of children. One of the most important
conclusions these studies have drawn is that our notions of childhood have changed. They have
adapted themselves to society and to its conception of what a child should be. Thus, the ideas
about childhood during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries evolved continually. Writing and
literature tell us more about this evolution.
Childhood has for long been one of the central themes of American literature. Mark Twain’s The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) appear as stories of
childhood escape, of willful isolation from society and a continual struggle against conformity.
In line with the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s portrayal of children (Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
1852), Twain’s works discuss freedom and liberty in a reaction against the limits and constraints
of society. All of these are themes that echo William Blake’s natural, joyful, carefree, and
enlightened romantic child.
During the 20th century, childhood developed into a favorite theme for an ever-increasing
number of genres. The examples vary extensively, from C. S. Lewis’s indirect portrayals of
children at times of war to the poems, diaries, and writings by children (e.g., Anne Frank: The
Diary of A Young Girl, 1947) and children writing of the various experiences of their own
childhood. While in earlier centuries childhood was a preparation and a period of growing up,
the early 19th and 20th centuries saw the rise of the idea of holding on to childhood with
authors such as J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan, 1902–06) and Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine, 1957;
Farewell Summer, 2006). They represented the magic, wonders, and transience of childhood.
Coming of age
Most scholars agree on a standard definition of the coming-of-age narrative: Simply put, it
follows the development of a child or adolescent into adulthood. The roots of this narrative theme
can be traced back to the bildungsroman, or “formation novel.” Late 18th-century German
novels, such as Johann Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795), established a
narrative pattern that would be followed by several other authors in the forthcoming centuries.
This pattern typically features a young protagonist—either male or female—who undergoes a
troubled search for an adult identity by process of trials, experiences, and revelations. This theme
is prominent in several well-known American novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such
as Horatio Alger, Jr.’s Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Bootblacks (1868); Louisa
May Alcott’s Little Women (1869); Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); and J.
D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The popularity of this narrative has continued into
the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as shown in critically acclaimed books such as Dorothy
Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1993) and Jon Krakauer’s 1996 account of the life and death of
Chris McCandless in Into the Wild, and through popular culture texts, such as J. K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter series.
A coming-of-age narrative is dependent on a quest for an adult identity, this narrative is closely
linked to other areas of identity development, such as gender, race, social class, and national
identity (see nationalism). As Kenneth Millard argues, a recurring element of the coming-of-age
narrative is the way in which a protagonist’s adult identity is framed by historical events and
points of origin and conditioned by social obligations and expectations.
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This lecture is edited, compiled and delivered by Syed Hanif Rasool, Ph.D.
syedhanifrasool@gmail.com
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Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn serves as an example of this theory. In the novel, a young
Huck accompanies Jim, a runaway slave, on a trip down the Mississippi River to reach the free
North. The novel’s climax occurs when Jim is caught by slave catchers, and Huck must make a
decision between informing Miss Watson, Jim’s owner, about Jim’s location or attempting to free
Jim from his bondage. In his decision, Huck must balance the social obligation of returning
“property” to its rightful owner and his own conscience—during his trip, Huck has come to see
Jim not as a piece of property but as a human.
Ironically, Huck makes the decision to “go to hell” by following his conscience, attempting to
free Jim from his captivity. Twain’s novel, of course, was published after the institution of slavery
was abolished, but it serves as a historical point of reference, as Finn would have grown up in
pre-Civil War America. Huck Finn’s adult identity is framed within these racist confines;
although African Americans were free, they still were considered as inferior to whites. Thus, the
socially acceptable and expected thing for Huck to do would be to turn Jim in to Miss Watson,
and it is the deviation from this expectation that Huck believes will condemn his soul.
The Huck Finn example also serves as a way to highlight three additional features of the coming
of-age narrative. One of these features is the loss of childhood innocence. In Twain’s novel,
although Huck naïvely misunderstands the consequences of his decision, his naïveté speaks
volumes to readers.
The consequence of his decision marks his transition from childhood to adulthood. Prior to the
novel’s climax, Huck has been witness to the darker side of the adult world—from his father’s
racist diatribe about the voting rights of recently freed slaves to a long and bloody family feud
to the con artistry of the Duke and Dauphin. Unbeknownst to Huck—but abundantly clear to
the novel’s readers—is the influence that these events have on his decision to attempt to free
Jim—the first adult decision of his life. Because of his experiences and this decision, Huck realizes
that he may be outcast from his society, as he has deviated from its expected adult norms, and he
will no longer be able to go back to live his previous lifestyle of barefooted, pipe smoking truancy.
This deviation from expected norms highlights another feature of the coming-of-age narrative:
the realization of social expectations and norms. To once again use the Huck Finn example, Huck
fully realizes the implications of his decision: He considers himself damned and acknowledges
that he will be unable to fully participate in the adult world because of this violation. As such, he
is able to recognize the social, adult world now laid out before him. While this realization further
distances Huck from his childhood innocence, it also presents him with a choice: Either accept
this adult world and conform to its norms and standards or decide on Huck’s choice to light out
for the territories highlights a third feature of the coming-of-age narrative. His decision to leave
is rooted in another choice: to accept a socially constructed identity, or to construct a personal
sense of identity for oneself. While this idea is one of the oldest and most common themes of
literature, when examined through the lens of a coming-of-age narrative, it takes on additional
weight. self-exile. Huckleberry Finn, of course, chooses the latter, as he decides to light out for
the territories of the American West rather than conform to the rigid social obligations
demanded by pre–Civil War rural Missouri.

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This lecture is edited, compiled and delivered by Syed Hanif Rasool, Ph.D.
syedhanifrasool@gmail.com
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Huck’s choice to light out for the territories highlights a third feature of the coming-of-age
narrative. His decision to leave is rooted in another choice: to accept a socially constructed
identity, or to construct a personal sense of identity for oneself. While this idea is one of the
oldest and most common themes of literature, when examined through the lens of a coming-of-
age narrative, it takes on additional weight
The Land and the Frontier
America was the New World, the New Eden for the early settlers. Open, fruitful, and lush,
America offered the promise of paradise and the possibility of renewal. America was, and for
many still is, the new frontier, untamed and unexplored, that we venture into to discover not just
what is on the other side of that valley or just over that hill, but to discover who we are and what
we can be. Even today, when there is seemingly no new land left to be explored, this aspect of
the American character still reveals itself in our desire to take to the road. In America we move,
we leave home to go to college, take a job in New York, and trek across country in a bus. The
road, it seems, is in our blood.
In American literature, the theme of the land and the frontier has taken several shapes. For some
writers, the land is a place of hope and renewal, as with the Transcendentalists. For others, the
American frontier is a dangerous wilderness, a place of mysterious evil, as we see with
Naturalism.
Community
Whereas the larger society, as suggested above, often constricts, limits, and even destroys the
individual, community often serves as the individual’s salvation. What distinguished community
from society, above all, is its size. Society is large, abstract, impersonal, a nameless force defeating
our hopes and suffocating our identities. Community, on the other hand, is smaller, more specific,
and more personal. It can even provide solace, love, compassion, and support. Our desire to be a
part of a community is met by sharing with others our tastes in music, clothing, hobbies, religion,
careers, and yes, Greek sorority and fraternity symbols.
In American literature, this theme is particularly seen in contemporary multi-cultural literature
and in women’s literature. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and the slave narratives all suggest that
it is in the security of a real community, rather than in our own personal glories, where we will
find a home. And because the heroes of these novels do find such a home, their journeys are very
often successful ones.
Curiosity
“I want to know!” These four words expressing the curiosity of mankind have led the way from
the cave to the skyscraper of modern civilization. Upon them America is founded; for Christopher
Columbus discovered America because he “wanted to know” what lay across the deep water from
the shores of Spain. Curiosity is at heart of American literature.
Alienation
Alienation is a powerful force, one that moves humans toward the negative impulses of self-pity,
vulnerability, and violence, but that can also result in the positive results of deep introspection
and intellectual independence. Countless literary characters feel painfully alienated from the
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This lecture is edited, compiled and delivered by Syed Hanif Rasool, Ph.D.
syedhanifrasool@gmail.com
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social institutions that surround them. In American literature, characters like Jake Barnes in
Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, feel alienated from their own communities. Others, like
Caddy Compson in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, feel alienated from their closer
connections, including family members and loved ones.
Works like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby explore the general condition of alienation by
depicting characters who are cut off from one another despite familial connections or close daily
proximity. For instance, the title character, Jay Gatsby, born Jay Gatz, has cut himself off from
his past, thus alienating himself from what might be called his natural place in the world. He has
done this so that he may infiltrate Daisy Buchanan’s world—a world of wealth, society, and
superficiality. Yet despite making this transfer, he remains alienated, as Daisy’s circle see him as
foreign and out of place. He yearns to be a part of her world, but he does so because he thinks
that is the way to win her love. Because he moves along this route, which is unnatural to him, his
attempt is doomed to fail. The modern world Fitzgerald depicts in The Great Gatsby—with its
artificial distinctions between West Egg and East Egg; its social caste system that leads Myrtle
Wilson to have no more value than an animal; and its monumental Valley of Ashes, an artificial
barrier separating the rich and the poor, brought about by capitalism and industrialization—
suggests a world that will eventually alienate us all from one another by replacing honesty and
emotion with facade and ambition.
Ambition
“Ambition” is a difficult trait to pin down because it is so human: On the one hand, we want to
reward ambition, yet on the other hand, we want to warn against it. Literature, especially, has
taken the latter interesting approach to examining ambition; however, the term itself was
originally relatively neutral, coming from the Latin ambito or ambitus, meaning “going around,
circuit, edge, border.” The dangers of ambition have been a popular theme not only in literature,
but also through religious and mythological texts. In the book of Genesis in the Old Testament,
for example, ambition is given much attention. The earliest consequence of ambition occurred
when Adam and Eve decided to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, so that their “eyes shall
be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5), even though God had
warned them that they would die if they ate of the tree. The result of such ambition? Adam and
Eve were granted knowledge, but they were banished from the Garden of Eden.
Sigmund Freud proposes a model of human desires and ambitions in his 1920 essay “Beyond the
Pleasure Principle,” in which he argues that the human psyche is divided into three parts: the id,
the ego, and the superego. The id represents the human unconscious, amoral desire to be satisfied,
whether it is by food, sex, drugs, or power. The ego strives to mediate between the id and the
superego—sometimes having to satisfy one or the other; the ego is a conscious attempt to balance
primitive desires with a rational need to negotiate the “real world.” The superego essentially
functions as an individual’s conscience, reminding him or her what the “real world” views as
acceptable and moral—and what it does not; the super-ego is at odds with the potentially
ambitious id.
Shortly after Freud presented his model for the psyche, human desires—of which ambition is one
of the most powerful—found itself being examined through the lens of psychology yet again. If
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This lecture is edited, compiled and delivered by Syed Hanif Rasool, Ph.D.
syedhanifrasool@gmail.com
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we consider ambition as essentially a form of motivation, a manifestation of desires, then it was

the American psychologist Abraham Maslow who, in 1943, first helped contextualize ambition
within his “hierarchy of needs.” Within this hierarchy, Maslow argues that humans have several
types of needs, ranging from the most basic to the most complex; these needs address physical
(hunger, sleep), safety (housing, jobs), social (love, friendship), esteem (achievements, power), and
self-actualization (wisdom and enlightenment) desires. Ambition can easily be considered a
“desire for esteem,” which nicely aligns with the Oxford English Dictionary’s primary definition
of ambition as an “inordinate desire.”
American literature also highlights figures with conflicting desires. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a
Salesman, Willie Loman struggles with his failure to achieve what he perceives as the modern,
post-World War II version of the American dream. Willie’s ambition was to achieve success
through owning his own business and making as much money as possible. But it is Willie’s
ambition—or lack thereof—that makes the play an intriguing look at how ambition can affect
our lives.
An earlier text, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, revolves around the misunderstanding of
the main character, Jay Gatsby, whose business success during the Roaring Twenties was
probably caused by his ambition to achieve the American dream, to “do better” than his modest
beginnings seemed to allow him to do. Gatsby’s rise in power and acquisition of wealth stand in
stark contrast to Willie Loman’s failure to attain any of these things. Both characters, however,
seem uncomfortable with their ambition and its consequences, remaining conflicted characters
throughout the telling of their respective tales

__________________________________________________________________________________
This lecture is edited, compiled and delivered by Syed Hanif Rasool, Ph.D.
syedhanifrasool@gmail.com