The Pursuit of Happyness

While Bettye Jean tells Gardner that he needs to give himself legitimacy because no one else will, he seeks role models that will give him practical ideas for how to live his life. In his family, Uncle Henry, the dapper ladies’ man who travels the world, tells him of a life outside of his Milwaukee neighborhood. From popular culture, the jazz musician Miles Davis shows Gardner the power of transforming the atmosphere in a room. Gardner imitates Davis in learning to play the trumpet but soon learns that music is not his calling.

In all of his professions, Gardner finds mentors who he can model himself on, be it at the hospital lab, in sales, or in learning the stock market. This forms part of his OJT (On-the-Job Training). Gardner learns these men’s practical techniques and applies them to his own work; however, he is always on the lookout for change-makers who are not afraid to strike out on their own. Gardner emulates their bold, independent attitude and adds his own variations. Repeatedly, Gardner emphasizes that his willingness to learn and his propensity for asking questions have been crucial to his success. 

Gardner, who went from abused, disenfranchised child growing up in the Milwaukee ghetto to the CEO of his own brokerage firm, is in many ways the living embodiment of the American Dream. However, his path to this dream has not been linear. He is aware that he desires greatness and to rise above the circumstances of his birth from the outset; still, he tries many career paths, including medicine and sales, before he becomes a stockbroker and philanthropist. In the early years of his life in San Francisco, when he was working in Robert Ellis’ cutting-edge medical lab and married to the beautiful, refined Sherry Dyson, he came close to approximating a middle-class version of the dream; however, he let it all go via his affair with Jackie and decision to quit medical research. As he begins to redefine success for himself, his situation becomes extremely precarious when he finds himself a homeless stockbroker and single father. Importantly, for Gardner, it is vital to achieve a version of the American Dream that is authentic to him, rather than a cookie-cutter, bourgeois version thereof. 

Gardner’s memoir brims with the sense of dignity, vigor, and strength he locates in and through being black. From the outset, there is the strong character of Bettye Jean, who, despite being turned out by her family and accepting to live under conditions of domestic violence, has an intrinsic sense of both her own worth and Gardner’s. Similarly, Gardner’s blue-collar, steelworker uncles have a strong work ethic and an ability to come to life at the weekend. Gardner takes all of this in stride as a child, but when he has his first encounters with non-blacks as a teenager during the Civil Rights Movement, he gains a real sense of his black identity and looks up to black celebrities ranging from musician Miles Davis to Civil Rights activist Malcolm X. After a brief stint of being bitter that lighter-skinned blacks such as Smokey Robinson seem to be preferred, Gardner embraces his darker skin and seeks partners possessive of non-white standards of beauty.

Gardner conveys how he wins racist white people over with his competency, when they look down on him in his medical years and as a stockbroker. After a period of playing more “green” than black at Dean Witter, during which he forgoes meetings with racist clients in favor of telephone conversations and capitalizes on his ethnically-ambiguous name, Chris Gardner, he aligns himself with the advancement of blacks at the helm of his own company and in his work with Nelson Mandela(283).