A Raisin In The Sun Literary Analysis

Earl Nightingale once said ”Never give up on your dreams just because of the time it will take to accomplish them.” This statement is important because if dreams are not accomplished it can negatively affect a person’s mental and emotional health. In Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun Walter Lee and Beneatha start to give up on their dreams because of the time it is taking to achieve them. Their dreams would take a long time to achieve and so they blindly believe that they will be unable to fulfill their dreams because of their current financial situation, making their dreams almost impossible to accomplish. The effects of not being able to satisfy a dream has struck both Beneatha and Walter. The poem “A Dream Deferred”, written by Langston Hughes, is parallel to both Beneatha and Walters’ situations as both of their dreams have been deferred.

In other words, to become a doctor. Beneatha’s dream of helping others vanished after Walter loses all of the insurance money. While explaining the current situation to Asagai ,Beneatha describes herself as “nothing” (Hansberry 132).This shows that she has given up and “stopped caring” (Hansberry 133) about her dreams. At this moment, Beneatha feels very pessimistic because after her dream was taken away she feels as if there is nothing good left for her in life. Beneatha’s dream is “dry ... / like a raisin in the sun” (Hughes 3-4). Her dream can be described using Langston Hughes’s “A Dream Deferred” poem because her dream is still there with potential but, she does not believe in in anymore, therefore it is dried up. Similarly, her dream is left alone like a raisin is left in the sun by itself to dry. Like Beneatha, Walter also suffers from not being able to achieve his