The Illusion of the American Dream Theme Analysis

Rather than portraying American society as one in which everyone can achieve success, Miss Lonelyhearts portrays a society that both produces and profits off of human suffering. On the surface, Miss Lonelyhearts works a stable writing job that offers him a unique opportunity to make tangible changes in everyday readers’ lives. However, Miss Lonelyhearts conveys early on that his job has trapped him in a lifestyle that he can no longer handle. He finds himself plagued by the letters he receives, which provide him with an intimate look into the suffering of New Yorkers, many of whom struggle with significant financial burdens and all of whom feel lost and in desperate need of help and advice. Additionally, considering that Miss Lonelyhearts remains unnamed throughout the entirety of the novella and is only addressed by the name of the “Miss Lonelyhearts” advice column, it’s clear that those around him have begun viewing him as synonymous with his job. In other words, he’s seen as a worker—a producer of goods for others to consume—rather than as a fully-fledged person in his own right.

To go further, although Miss Lonelyhearts finds himself empathizing with his readers’ struggles, the advice column wasn’t born out of good intentions, but primarily as a way to sell papers. When Shrike tries to help Miss Lonelyhearts respond to letters, his advice is disingenuous and satirical, and he’s even prevented Miss Lonelyhearts from suggesting suicide as a way to escape suffering solely because this would decrease their readership. By extension, then, the larger economic system that Miss Lonelyhearts belongs to isn’t motivated by a genuine intention to help people, either; rather, it sustains itself by means of the human suffering it claims to alleviate... Through the empty farce of Miss Lonelyhearts’s advice column, the novella critiques the American Dream as not only elusive, but as a damaging falsehood.