Liz Streaker American Dream Final What is the American Dream according to Jerzy Kosinski and Shirley Jackson? How does these authors� idea of the American Dream pertain to their two works read for class? Although the American dream has been slightly modified, it remains synonymous with wealth and prestige. There are, of course, exceptions and technicalities to this generalization. The American Dream means something different for everyone. Jerzy Kosinski�s and Shirley Jackson�s American dreams were different. While Kosinski yearned for recognition and control of his own fate, Jackson hoped for the disintegration of intolerance and bigotry. The two author�s American dreams were also similar. They both wanted to live a better world than the one they were raised in. This is shown through the novella, Being There by Jerzy Kosinski and the short story by Shirley Jackson titled �The Lottery.� Jerzy Kosinski was charming and had a strong personality (Teicholz). He was born on June 14, 1933 in Lodz, Poland. Jerzy Kosinski survived several traumatic experiences. He escaped the Holocaust and communist Poland in his early years. Due to a serious accident as a child, Kosinski became mute until years later when a second serious accident occurred, while skiing. He suddenly regained his speech. At this time, Kosinski was still rehabilitating at the YMCA rehabilitation center and was going to a school for the handicapped. A few years before, he was �found by his parents in an orphanage, still mute and half crazed� (Lavers). With the help of tutors and his father, Jerzy Kosinski finished high school in a year. He continued on to receive his MA in History in 1953 and his MA in Political Science in 1955. �Both of his dissertations were, ironically, devoted to the tragic plight of political opposition in the nineteenth-century Russia.� (Lavers). In 1957, he arrived in New York with little money and no English. Within months he was fluent in English. With the help of his new-found freedom (Lavers), Kosinski became a Ford Fellow at Columbia University a year later. Only a few years later, he married the American heiress, Mary Weir and was living on Park Avenue in New York City. Even with the great fortune Kosinski possessed upon arriving in America, his life was not without problems. He never compromised his American dream. Due to his honest and humble nature, Kosinski received severe criticism for letting his friends read his work before it was published. �The Village Voice� even went as far to say that he was letting others do his writing for him. Years before, Kosinski mentioned in an interview: �I was not in any way ashamed to expose my manuscript to friends who would read it�..I made 16, 17 copies of every draft and showed it to people. I chose some people whose language was not English and some Americans. I asked them to mark a little cross next to anything that didn�t sound right. If enough people marked a sentence, I knew something was wrong with it.� Even though he was brilliant, Jerzy Kosinski was still a little insecure about the English language and simply wanted feedback from his friends. In response to the controversy, Kosinski stated, �My political and moral credibility has been damaged.� In 1969, due to a baggage mix-up in Paris, Kosinski was ��miss[ed] by one day being murdered by the Manson gang in Sharon Tate�s house.� (Lavers) In 1989, Kosinski founded the Polish American Resource Corporation (PARC). �Kosinski�s writing is aimed directly at eliminating our provincial �sensitivity�� (Lavers). Kosinski was very self-aware and his theories, for lack of a better term, of life were most eccentric. Jerzy Kosinski got the recognition he desired in the form of several awards, money he earned from his popular novels and admiration of people all over the world. Like his life, his �picaresque� novels also included sudden changes and �violence and sudden death� (Lavers). Perhaps his traumatic life had finally caught up with him and even the outlet of writing would not do. Jerzy Kosinski would have argued that. He probably would have said his death was not the result of painful experiences but of the fact that, finally, he truly was the determinant of his own life. Not anyone else. Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide on May 3, 1991. �Jerzy Kosinski has often spoken of his novels as constituting a �cycle,� united by the common theme of the individual versus the society� (Lavers). In Jerzy Kosinski�s Being There, Chance is struggling with the society he was suddenly engulfed in. This is similar to Jerzy Kosinski�s life. No wonder Jerzy illustrated this struggle so well. Chance, the protagonist of Being There, has relatable characteristics but at the same time a complete mystery. As a child, Jerzy Kosinski was mute for several years. This explains why many of his protagonists, including Chance in Being There, are �mute� (Teicholz). As mentioned earlier, Kosinski �yearned for recognition�. This concept was portrayed through the other characters in Being There. Kosinski was criticizing the characters who sought that. Putting Chance on a pedestal, it was if Jerzy was saying that Chance was the better person out of them all because he turned down his fame and acceptance to do what he truly loved. Kosinski never admitted whether that was what he meant in his novel. That is because Jerzy Kosinski wanted his readers to think for themselves and come to their own conclusions about how to live life. Like Jerzy Kosinski�s own American dream, and his life, Chance made a choice and controlled his own fate. Shirley Jackson was born in 1919 in San Francisco to an upper-class family. She was a rebel and fought to break the mold for herself as a woman and as someone in high- economic standing. She spent much of her time writing in journals when she was younger. She claimed to have psychic abilities that began in her childhood. Through her literary works, Shirley Jackson often criticized the society around her. Shirley Jackson dealt with the pressure she received from her mother and from a conformist society in her younger years, by writing about them in her stories (Palegrrl20). In 1933, her family moved to Rochester and Shirley attended Brighton High school. She received a B.A. in English from Syracuse University and married Stanley Edgar Hyman in 1940. One year later, Shirley published her first story for twenty-five dollars in The New Republic. In 1945, she and her husband moved to North Bennington, Vermont. This town became the inspiration for some of her writing. Shirley Jackson made a great impact on the people who read her work. She exposed the wrongs of conformity and criticized the lack of tolerance and strong individuality in a close-knit community. An example of this, and a reflection of Jackson�s feelings toward the New England town she lived in, is shown through her short story, �The Lottery.� �The Lottery� was published in the New Yorker in 1948. This �result[ed] in hundreds of cancelled subscriptions.� (Lethem) The characters in the lottery illustrated the conformity and lack of individuality that Shirley Jackson despised. Due to the fatal characters of the people in her story, the ritual remained the same. The ritual of this contemporary community was outdated, yet, the people continued to practice it. The ritual consisted of brutally killing the chosen one with rocks. The story was, and still is, an admired allegory. Shirley Jackson died in 1965. Jerzy Kosinski and Shirley Jackson had varying American Dreams and came from completely different backgrounds. Even so, they had something in common: both had grievances towards the society they found themselves in and had the courage to expose those grievances in their writing. Also, both authors had reason to be a little insecure and they both attempted to overcome it through their writing. Certainly, Jerzy Kosinski had an accomplished life and received recognition both formally and informally. And, in the end, he gained true control over his life. On the other hand, Shirley Jackson�s American Dream was admirable but just as impractical. Unfortunately, the annihilation of intolerance and bigotry was not within her power. Both authors did make a positive impact on reader�s lives and continue to share their American Dream. Works Cited Heuss, Michael R. "About Shirley Jackson." Great Literature Online. 1997-2003 <http://www.underthesun.cc/Classics/Jackson/> (13 April, 2003). Lavers, Norman. Jerzy Kosinski. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982. Lethem, Jonathan. �Monstrous Acts and Little Murders.� Salon.com. 1997 < http://www.salon.com/jan97/jackson970106.html> (13 April, 2003). Lupack, Barbara Tepa, ed. Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski. Palegrrl20. �Society, Rebellion, and the Patriarchal Society: A Biographical, Feminist, And Marxist Interpretation of Shirley Jackson�s �The Lottery.� Geocities.com. 18 December, 2001. < http://www.geocities.com/palegrrl20/jackson.html> (14 April, 2003). Sloan, James Park. New York: Dutton, 1996. Teicholz, Tom. Conversations with Jerzy Kosinski. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Outline What is the American Dream according to Jerzy Kosinski and Shirley Jackson? How does these authors� idea of the American Dream pertain to their two works read for class? I. Introduction � what is the American dream? II. Thesis paragraph � what is the American dream to j.k and s.j.? III. J.K. BIO (emphasize his idea of the American dream) a - American dream for him as well as other people b- Positives and negatives of the American dream from his pov c- discuss how this is illustrated in Being There IV. S.J. BIO (emphasize her idea of the American dream) - American dream for her as well as other people - Positives and negatives of the American dream from her pov - discuss how this is illustrated in �the lottery� V. conclusion - summarize both the authors main pov - Compare/Contrast the two authors pov�s
