What American Dream?

Jumping in on the “American Dream” conversation…

For all the hysteria and laughable, drug-induced absurdity of Raoul Duke’s and his attorney’s surreal escapades through the desert and the mirage of Las Vegas, comedy remains at best a superficial quality of the novel. Beneath the exterior of this humorously deranged narration lies the ugly underbelly of the drug culture that reveals the despair emerging from the search for the American Dream. For the youth of the ‘60s, the American Dream became not so much a pursuit of economic prosperity, but rather a dream of freedom in which intellectual wanderings manifested in a physical search. The retrospective of Fear and Loathing depicts this seeming clash of ideologies constituting the American Dream and ultimately engages the novel’s pair in the fruitless search for this now vanishing identity.  

The early ‘70s of Fear and Loathing show a continuation of the search begun in the ‘60s, with the beginning of the novel revealing Duke and his attorney eagerly in pursuit of the American Dream—believing its exact locale to be Las Vegas—and quickly transitioning into a mood of despair as the high of the delusion of the American Dream’s existence begins to wear off. It’s interesting to note (and particularly ironic) that this shift in the decades indicates a shift in perspective of not only what constitutes the Dream, but also its situation in the culture; as the American Dream became more difficult to achieve and more fluid in its make-up, it transitioned from occupying a state of being to occupying a specific locale. The novel awards Las Vegas as the site of this soon-to-be-discovered delusion, particularly because it capitalizes on extreme excess. In this way, Thompson mocks both America and its Dream, demonstrating that both symbols are empty save for their own lofty, excessive ambitions that lead nowhere; there is an attempt to legitimize Las Vegas as the referent of both American and its Dream, and yet such an endeavor collapses by the end of the novel, just like the burnt-down condition of the “Old Psychiatrist’s Club” outside Las Vegas that is denoted by locals as potentially functioning as the American Dream. Further, the style of the novel aids in the representation of empty signifiers brought to light through extremes, with the excess of foul language and drug use serving to not so much to depict a reality, but rather to emphasize the absurdity of the delusion.

In reading Fear and Loathing, I found the following passage to be one of the great moments of the novel, a moment that encapsulates and reflects the delusion of the American Dream and the emptiness that permeates its dissolving dimensions:

“…big crowds still gathered around crap tables. Who are these people? These faces! Where do they come from? They look like caricatures of used-car dealers from Dallas. But they’re real. And, sweet Jesus, there are a hell of a lot of them—still screaming around these desert-city crap tables at four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winter somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino” (57).

“Still humping the American Dream.” What a fantastic image. Duke narrates a reflection in which the American Dream is objectified and sexualized. Tourists to Las Vegas are so desperate to find the American Dream that they latch on to the empty signifier of this desert mirage and urgently thrust, unable to penetrate because of its existence as an illusion. The American Dream has not been destroyed, for such a feat is impossible; rather, the American Dream—as the beginning of the ‘70s reveals—has never existed in reality at all, and it ironically takes the delusional and hallucinogenic state of consciousness prompted by the consumption of drugs to show Duke the truth of the illusion.