Topic

Topic overview

The topics of J.D. Vance’s introduction to his book Hillbilly Elegy. A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis are upward social mobility and the American Dream. The American Dream is a concept according to which everyone in the US can enjoy upward social mobility and overcome the conditions they were born in through their own efforts. In other words, a person who is born into a poor family supposedly has as good a chance as anyone to succeed in life, and to move to the middle or upper class, through hard work.

J.D. Vance’s text looks at whether the American Dream is available to poor white working-class people. He explores this topic through his personal story and the stories of other people in the poor community he grew up in.

On the one hand, Vance is an example of a success story about the American dream (ll. 19-21). Even though he came from an uneducated, poor family, had a drug-addicted parent, and was struggling in high school, he eventually managed to shift his life in another direction studying at Yale Law school and finding a good job that helped him become part of  the middle class. The writer’s argument is that he achieved this primarily thanks to “handful of loving people” (ll. 23-24) who rescued him.

One the other hand, the text explores the numerous factors that prevent poor people from achieving the American Dream. Some of these factors are the industrial decline and the fact that fewer jobs are available for the working class, while middle-class jobs are often only available to those with a college education: “… manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and middle-class jobs are harder to come by for people without college degrees” (ll. 80-81). However, Vance also argues that the culture surrounding poor white people also contributes to the failure of the American Dream: “It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it” (ll. 83-85). He argues that within this culture, people fail to show initiative or a willingness to work hard, limiting their chances of overcoming the circumstances th...