Character Analysis
Oh Deborah, we hardly knew ye. No, for real—despite the fact that Deborah is massively important to the plot of An American Dream, we really don't know much about her. Sure, we're given a few potential identities—some more ridiculous than others—but none seem to truly fit.
Let's go ahead and take a look at these potential identities:
- Is Deborah "a lioness of the species" (1.14), as Rojack claims? Of course, Rojack is mega-biased in this instance: He only portrays her so harshly because he is deeply intimidated by her. And we're sure that the whole divorce thing isn't influencing his opinion…
- Is she the "most heavenly girl in the whole glorious world," as her dear Aunt Bess claims? In fact, all of Deborah's friends and family seem to hold her in extremely high regard. And this description of Deborah couldn't be any more different from Rojack's.
- Or is the craziest hypothesis of them all—that Deborah is a secret agent—the one that's true? This might sound far-fetched, but the evidence points to this being at least somewhat accurate. At the very least, Deborah dated a lot of spies, feeling a "tremendous sexual excitement […] for the best agents" (8.236). Ooh la la.
While each of these ideas certainly has a drop of truth in them, they're merely smaller pieces of a bigger puzzle. To be honest, it's likely that no one truly knows Deborah on the inside. She was born into immense wealth and power—it was this wealth and power that led Rojack to seek "the road to President […] at the entrance to her Irish heart" (1.2)—and because of this, her life was probably full of people like Rojack, latching onto her for purely selfish reasons.
Plus, you can't discount Deborah's rough childhood. Her relationship with her father seems weird enough on the surface, but Kelly's revelation that they had a thing makes it so much weirder. Basically, Deborah is used by people her entire life—Rojack is merely the last in a long line—and because of this (and her death early on), we never really get to know who she is. But even if we don't know much about Deborah's identity, we owe it to her to at least acknowledge her struggles. Because struggle is definitely a defining characteristic of her life experiences.