Sullivan’s Travels (1941): The American Gulliver or Deconstructing the American Dream

Abstract

In my paper, I will focus on the director Preston Sturges’ intervention in the Depression-era comedy, rooted in the satirical format of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in an attempt to highlight the ways in which his revolutionary approach to narrative and character undermined the coherence of representations of the Ameri can Dream. Preston introduced non-linearity and Naturalistic and Absurdist elements in typical comedy formats (like the screwball comedy), thus challenging the veracity of American Dream narratives. Sullivan’s Travels (1941), in which socially conscious endeavors only prolong social misery and unrest, postpones narrative resolution to the point of becoming the ultimate deconstruction of the American Dream. Moreover, Preston Sturges’ movies play with narrative in such a way as to unravel the constructedness of the American Dream. By choosing to foreground moral ambivalence over clear-cut categorizations, his films delight in the characters’ misadventures without passing moral judgment. Rooted in genuine feeling rather than prescribed reactions, Sturges’ movies lend a paradoxically empathetic skepticism to the interpretation of the American Dream, privileging humanity over stereotype.