Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Emily Dickens were marginalized through out their carriers and each, in some way or form, was told they could not achieve their dreams. This lead each of them to contemplate how one adjusts to not achieving there dreams. Hughes ponders the many several outcomes that can ensue; Brooks considers how one might adjust their dream to fit what society deems appropriate, and Dickens portrays a woman who hides her true dreams within herself.
In Langston Hughes’ Harlem, he asks the reader “what happens to a dream differed?”(579). He does not ask what happens if a dream is differed. To him the likely hood of achieving ones dream seems so small that he does not waste time pondering what it might be like if the dream were to come true, and instead spends his time contemplating what it feels like when one does not achieve the dream. Would their desire disappear, like water from “a raisin in the sun”?(393) Would the thought of not achieving the dream be so overpowering, so pungent, that one could not ignore it. Or would it be something sweet, something to reminisce about, to …show more content…
Society had expected nothing of them but to waste their life away, they certainly were not expected to aspire to anything. All that was expected of them was for them to play their life away. By writing “we real cool” (393) Brooks’ seems to say that the characters themselves had accepted these as their dream. That society had so engrained this idea that they could not amount to anything more than mere pool players that they now rejoice in their role and boast about it. However by the last line one can tell there is a twinge of sadness in the characters. “We Jazz June. We Die soon” implies that the characters, despite their outward bravado, are still contemplating how it will all end and what they will have left when they are