The American Dream is generally believed to consist of a healthy family, a well-paying job, and a solid home. Many people dream of it and use every opportunity to make it happen. However, the socioeconomic situation of the United States constitutes an obstacle to this ideal. The characters who populate Raymond Carver's cathedral are American workers confused and deluded by the empty image of an American dream that they see every evening on the television screen. Denis Johnson's protagonists, however, have never heard of the American dream, and are certainly not dedicated to its realization; their lives slip away from a state of alcoholism and drug use and the future becomes brutally shapeless. Their despair and disappointments are instead replaced by drug addiction, alcoholism, infidelity and unemployment. Nonetheless, there are rare but genuine impulses of hope in both authors' stories. (Carvarians find their own ways to communicate and influence each other to survive in this brutal world. Johnson's character is influenced by his experience and surroundings; his sparks of hope manifest as he is on his journey to healing .) Despite the fallacy of the American Dream, Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver's characters occasionally have moments of hope, both in the struggle to achieve the American Dream and in spite of it. In “A Small, Good Thing,” Carver builds his story around the Weiss couple: a wealthy, happy family that has been “kept from any real danger” (Carver, 62). The Weiss couple are distinguished from Carver's typical characters by the fact that they are happy and prosperous. However, their tragedy belies that wealth and prosperity can protect against fate. When a car hits little Scotty on his birthday, their paper characters, hope is masked in the first years of life by violence and chemicals. Sometimes a simple glimmer of hope can be enough to animate lost causes, which vegetate in drugs or in joyless lives. Carver's characters orient themselves obsessively toward the material promises of the American dream, but discover that the most qualifying abstractions do not come from a home or a well-paying job. Despite all the disappointments and despair, one must always find a ray of light that can shine even in the darkest world. Sometimes it's hard to speak up and say what people really mean: either they aren't skilled enough at intimacy with others, or they simply feel the need to protect themselves. But in these stories there are other ways of communication. Even though the things done in the stories seem to have no purpose, they help people in a very difficult time in their lives.