What Is Bruce Springsteen's View Of The American Dream

Reflection on the American Dream in the Views and Songs of Bruce Springsteen

ABSTRACT:
When promoting his album Wrecking Ball in Paris on 2012, Bruce Springsteen told journalists that his work had always been about judging the distance between American reality and the American Dream. This article explores one founding myth of the United States, the American Dream in some songs of Bruce Springsteen and tries to measure the gap between the dream and real life in the U.S. today.
Keywords: American Dream- Bruce Springsteen- American reality- Immigrants- Ambivalence- Authenticity
Plan
Introduction
The American Dream: a Founding Myth of the United States
The American Dream from the External Viewpoint of Immigrants
Springsteen’s Distance between

For Deardorff, fulfilling the American Dream is a “basic human condition of the contemporary age” (Deardorff, 37). Lingeman views the American characters as trying to “escape from the awful loneliness of the human condition” (Lingeman, 107). But perhaps these American characters do not struggle with their human condition; rather they struggle with their American condition. Springsteen seems to understand this American condition and offers some insights into real life in

It gives room to different interpretations, and can be summarized as a basic philosophy or a set of rules to be followed blindly to achieve a successful life. The dream can be considered as one of the founding myths of the United States as well as the Promised Land or the Frontier. After all, America was founded on myths as suggested in Greil Marcus’s 1975 Mystery Train. “To be an American, unlike being English or French or whatever, is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history” (Marcus,