James Baldwin’s Critique and Reconfiguration of the American Dream in "The Fire Next Time". DEEP CHAND YADAV College

The term American Dream has undergone several interpretations since its coinage by James Truslow Adams in his book Epic of America, he defines American Dream as a means that promises an individual, regardless of their birth and social stature, equality, and social mobility in a society otherwise grimly interwoven. American Dream gives an equal “opportunity to each according to [his] ability or achievement”(32). Any person through hard work and education can attain the Dream.

But the Dream was severely criticized for its capitalist mindset and re-interpreted by sociologists, Marxists, poets, and authors differently. It crumpled under the burden of income inequalities, racial tensions, and ideological antagonism, failing heavily in providing equality and upper mobility to its minorities. Langston Hughes in his poem, “Let America Be America Again”, writes that, “America never was America to me”(5), the Dream that validated equality and equal opportunity to everyone fell short in furnishing Black and Red Americans what it had promised.

In his book The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin critiques the subjugation of blacks by whites and reconfigured the American Dream narrating his real-life incidents. In the first part, “My Dungeon Shook...