Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Thompson’s Satire of the American Dream Nathan Young College

The American Dream is a concept that first takes on its concrete form in The Epic of America; it is described as "That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement...That dream or hope has been present from the start." (Adams, xvi). And though it is certainly a term taken ambiguously at best, this classification is one that rings mostly true to its central idea, which is akin to the Horatio Alger pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps ideal. It has several tangents and different interpretations, but it is largely regarded as associated with wealth or advancement of some sort. What Hunter S. Thompson seeks to do in his painfully satirical novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: a Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, is not only to deconstruct and realize the absurdity of such an idea but to kick it while it is down and make a mockery of it. Thompson rejects the idea of the American Dream with such severity that he associates it with a hallucination-crazed, drug-induced weekend binge of absolute nonsensicalness.

To begin, it is necessary to get a slightly more exhaustive grasp on the American Dream as an ideal. One of...