Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun

Dreams. What do we do with them? Harlem by Langston Hughes asks, what happens to a dream deferred? Lorraine Hansberry opens up her book, The Raisin in the Sun, with this poem for a certain reason. We see that throughout the book each character suffers through many trials with their deferred dreams and different ways of handling them. They both touch on how racial discrimination and financial reasons were the reasons why the dreams of many African Americans were deferred and the many different outcomes of what could happen to a dream that is deferred. The poem and the book are well matched because they both address the same reason to as why the dreams of African Americans are deferred. The title of the poem, Harlem, carries a lot of weight.

In Harlem, Hughes presents the idea that dreams essentially die in different ways. But in the last line of the poem, the speaker asks “or does it explode? (Hughes 11). Through this line, Hughes could have been expressing how people can react to a deferred dream. At this time, African Americans were facing an insurmountable amount of oppression, but were starting to speak out. They began to fight and say that they would not accept this kind of repression and act upon it. He could have been referring to this explosion as the people growing sick of this oppression and attempting to demolish these limits. They needed to explode. In this case, Walter is the perfect interpretation of this. We see how his dream is begins to explode out of his control. After he loses all his money to Willy, he cannot control himself and begins to accept the stereotypical depiction of an African American. Through this process, he loses all self respect and dignity for himself and goes crazy. This can be one interpretation of when his dream explodes, but I believe that it is when he begins to speak out against Mr. Linder. At this point, we see how the pent up anger impacts him and how he can’t hold it in anymore. He says that they are a very proud family and “we have decided to move into our house because my father -- my father -- he earned it for us brick by brick”. We see how Walter is refusing to accept the limits set on him anymore. He decides that he is going to reap what their family deserves and that they cannot will not accept having their dream deferred anymore. This is the means through which Walter’s dream