The people who surround Walter Lee are all trying to get him to adjust to the conditions of life for a Negro in a white man's world. All except Beneatha. Beneatha seeks her own escape first in a series of hobbies and fads, then in intellectualism and a desire to find her African roots.

All this is played against the backdrop of a society that is indifferently hostile to the aspirations of black folk in an environment of ignorance, lassitude, hate, filth and poverty. The Younger's apartment is an oasis wherein all of society's "good" values are being maintained with substantial assistance from the King James version….

If serious can be taken to mean earnest, deep, grave, sober, solemn, not joking or trifling, then we might say that the setting of A Raisin in the Sun is indeed appropriate to tragedy. The condition out of which the action of this play arises is very serious in terms of the moral behavior of men. (p. 404)

[The plot devices] are developed in a naturalistic style that is so real and immediate that it has tended to render obscure, to many reviewers, the underlying tragic action of this play. The tragic unity of action in the play is achieved through the delicate balancing of pity and terror. The terror of abortion, which Ruth contemplates, the terror of loss of the "family jewels," the terror of Walter Lee upon the table exhorting his "black brothers" to action to the accompaniment of African drums, the terror of the realization that everybody's dream is lost; all this is balanced exquisitely by the pity for an expectant mother with no place to lay her babe, and the pity for Walter Lee in the face of his failure before his family. (pp. 404-05)

This balance gives the catharsis. The plot devices enumerated above become unimportant when compared to this balance. (p. 405)

The essential difference, perhaps the only difference between Walter Lee and his mother is the thing that makes Walter Lee a tragic character and Lena, not. Lena does not accept the reality of the world around her, whereas, Walter Lee does. But the reality still exists, accept it or not, for both of them. The question for us more aptly becomes, "What happens to the tragic dreamer of a dream deferred?" (p. 406)

The language of the play at this moment of great tension when Walter Lee is throwing out the representative from the white group is disappointing. (p. 407)

The language of A Raisin in the Sun is for the most part the speech of actual life, although it is most always expressive, unusually expressive…. Tragedy does dictate a nobility of language…. The sense of magnitude does not result from the individual words used in the work; it results more from the poetic pattern of the words, the cadence, the rhythm, the allusions, the same devices that make Whitman's poetry made up of ordinary words, majestic. (pp. 407-08)

The "happiness" that one does feel at the end of this play is not happiness at all…. It is the resultant feeling from the representation of personal suffering and heroism which we call tragic drama. (p. 409)