What is the American Dream?

The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, a set of ideals in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, and an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers. According to the American dream, life should be better and richer and fuiler for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. Wilhelm is the representative of the American dream because he pursues money and success, falls in dichotomy between desire and limitation, and gets less sympathy from others. 

Seize the Day presents a character who.is caught up in the impersonal American quest for money and success, yet who cannot ignore his own need for personal respect and compassion. A middleaged Tommy Wilhelm is faced with the need to make money and to avoid looking like a failure, yet he longs for the solace of his father’s approval. Tommy wants to listen to his heart, to trust even when that trust is foolish, as in his relationship with Dr. Tamkin. Tommy is an example of the long-suffering sensitive victim who, despite life’s hardships, remains basically noble in a fragmented world. Tommy’s plight is darkly comic—the poor soul who succumbs to the wiles of the fast-talking con artist and who is ultimately bereft of everything. 

Tommy is a representative example of Saul Bellow’s typical hero, , man trapped in the contradiction between desire and limitation, aspiration and ability. Such a hero experiences a conflict between pead and heart. He is unable to reconcile the disparity between knowing and feeling. Tommy knows, for example, that Tamkin is not to be trusted, but he wants in his heart to trust him. Tommy sees his father’s mean-spiritedness and contempt, but he wants his father’s sympathy nevertheless. Characteristically, Bellow depicts this contradiction not in naturalistic terms, as in the works of many of his contemporaries, but from a distinctly comic point of view. 

Tommy Wilhelm is a loser because he gets less sympathy from others. He is divorced, unemployed, broke, undereducated, selfindulgent, and dependent (on pills and his father, among other things). He lives in a hotel in New York City and wants desperately to put his life in order. Tommy, like all Bellow protagonists, has trouble determining how to cope with the modern world. One of the symbols of Tommy’s problems and those of modern society generally, is his relationship with his father. Tommy’s father lives in the same hotel and is disgusted with his son’s weakness. He refuses to give the one thing Tommy wants most--sympathy. Tommy makes one last grasp for success by investing in the commodities market under the dubious influence of Dr. Tamkin. His money quickly evaporates and with it his hopes. 

In conclusion it can be said that Tommy Wilhelm represents the American dream but the writer shows that the final climax comes because Tommy finds himself before the body of a dead stranger, unable to break away and he begins to cry and weep. He releases pools of emotion and “crie[s] with all his heart.” It is here that the book ends. Other people at the funeral are confused as to who he is, wondering how close he had been to the deceased. The deceased is a stranger but Tommy, however, is left in this “happy oblivion of tears.”