While the story follows closely three friends who are addicted to heroin, he says the book was not inspired solely by heroin addiction, though it may seem to some to be highlighting only that subject. says that his stories are influenced by just about everything, and that any particular incident may lead to just one line. Harry and his friends on the other hand, become strung out on heroin, although they swore to never let it happen to them. These shortcuts in life that both Sarah and Harry and his friends take become the antagonist for the story, as Sarah becomes unrecognizably thin, scary to her own friends, and delusional from the amphetamine laced diet pills.

Harry, his girlfriend Marion, and best friend Tyrone want to avoid all responsibilities, or “hassles” as Tyrone calls them, and achieve their dreams by shortcutting the system and selling drugs. Sarah Goldfarb is, as her character describes in the book, a lonely old woman whose ultimate dream is to lose enough weight so she can appear on a television in the dress she wore when she was younger and happier at Harry’s Bar Mitzvah.

The story, set in Brooklyn’s Coney Island, follows the paralleled stories of Sarah Goldfarb, a widowed mother, and her son Harry, a heroin addict, as they each go down their own path in search for better lives, without seeing their own undoing that eventually stray them from their goal. This success is defined by hard work, risk taking, and self-sacrifice, rather than one’s luck or chance. The American Dream by definition is the ideal by which any person has equal opportunity available to them as any American to achieve their highest aspirations while living in the United States through hard work and dedication, regardless of their social class or status when they were born. The book Requiem for a Dream, written by Hubert Selby Jr., was published in 1978 and is, in many critics’ opinions, Selby’s most extreme yet sincere illustration of the American Dream or in this case the failure to complete it.

Requiem for a dream selby