While the specific conceptualization of the American Dream changes from era to era, the underlying thread is one of unattainability. The postmodern rejection of any format of the American Dream is the natural conclusion to centuries of drowning in search of an ideal that doesn’t exist in real life.
The impossibility of the American Dream is twofold:
- The material success many iterations of the dream champions will not in itself make any one person happy or fulfilled. Even the most privileged man in America, capable of achieving everything it promotes, could get to the “end” unsatisfied
- Most Americans can’t even get to that unsatisfying end. Instead, the American Dream is held before them as something they are supposed to be able to achieve but can’t because of personal failings, not because of the systemic oppression working against them.
So the postmodern rejection of the American Dream as any valid goal for which to aspire can work to ease the minds of Americans who have felt unworthy for so long. Once these disheartened souls wake up from their American Dreaming, they can being to live like the Invisible Man: to recognize that all life is chaos, that trying to explain it by some narrow measure of empty success entirely futile. That dream, that success, those ways of achieving — they don’t exist.