Book Report

4 Pages 962 Words

A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, illustrates the timeless struggle for the furtherance of family values and morals with extreme clarity. The play follows the life of a small black family’s struggle to keep their dreams from tenants to owners alive. These dreams, and the struggles necessary to reach them, as well as coming to terms with the dreams that are out of reach, are the focus and driving force behind this story of every persons struggle to achieve goals that are not always in tune with societies thoughts or ideas on a persons place in life. The internal difficulties of the family, and the detrimental effects of these problems, are major themes in the play. In the opening scene; a husband, Walter, and wife, Ruth, are seen having a fight over Walter’s dream to become a “mover and shaker” in the business world by using an incoming insurance check for his mother as a down payment on a potential liquor business. Walter tells his wife, “I’m trying to talk to you ‘bout myself and all you can say is eat them eggs and go to work.” This is the first sign of Walter’s recurring feelings, that if someone in the family would just listen to him and put forth their trust, his dreams would come to life. Following this argument, Walter goes off to his job as a chauffeur which is the job he so longs to be done away with. As Walter dreams bigger and bigger he seems to leave the smaller things such as his family behind. This movement away from the family is against the family’s values and morals. (In the past his father would have been happy working for another man and caring for his family, but Walter is more concerned with becoming self-employed or at least in a management position without really thinking about the consequences which may be imposed upon his family by his incessant need to other things.) As seen later in the play, Walter learns that for the overall good of the family he needs to set his dreams aside an...