Deconstructing the American Dream

This article examines how Celeste Ng's novel Little Fires Everywhere deconstructs the American Dream by revealing the racial and class-based binaries that shape inclusion, power, and identity in suburban America. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's theory of deconstruction, Edward Said’s Orientalism, Lisa Lowe's critique of the model minority myth, and Homi Bhabha’s concept of the third space, this article argues that Ng reveals the illusion of equal opportunity by exposing how conformity to white, middle-class norms becomes the price of belonging. By using a nonlinear narrative, complex character dynamics, and a critique of commodified diversity, the novel questions the promise of equal opportunity and shows how privilege is maintained through exclusion. Ng's novel challenges the binary logics of success versus failure and insider versus outsider, revealing how marginalized characters resist and reframe the terms of belonging within structures of conditional inclusion.