Leah Noble Assignment 1

In her poem, "Inventing My Parents", one allusion Susan Ludvigson makes is to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is widely known for his novel The Great Gatsby in which he addresses the idea of the American Dream. Through his book, Fitzgerald makes clear his belief that no matter how glamorous the American Dream may seem from the outside, in reality, it brings nothing but destruction to those living it.

In Ludvigson's poem, she uses phrases such as, "bright café", "warm as a bath", and "light summer rain" which all possess a happy and cheerful connotation. These phrases make life in the 1940s appear happy, like how the American Dream appears to those on the outside. Life then, however, was not actually like this. As seen in discrete words such as, "shadow", "sweeping", and "night", the underlying truth, as with Fitzgerald's American Dream, is that trouble is all around and life during this time is not as great as what the poem makes it seem to be.