Dreams from My Father Themes

In his memoir, Barack Obama recounts his upbringing in Hawaii; his college years; his stint as a community organizer in Chicago; and finally, his first visit to Kenya in the months before he began studying law at Harvard. Born to a white American mother and a Black Kenyan father (who was mostly absent from Barack’s life), Barack’s story circles back again and again to what it means to be part of a family or a…

Though Barack Obama is interested in what it means to be part of a family more broadly, the memoir focuses specifically on the relationship between fathers and sons. Barack meets his father—whom he calls the Old Man—only once, when he’s 10 years old, and his father dies when Barack is 21. Due to his father’s absence from his life and the far-fetched stories of his father that he grows up with, Barack spends his…

Since Barack Obama’s father leaves him and his mother Ann when Barack is only two years old, Barack grows up with stories and the occasional letter, not the man himself. And later, as Barack connects with his far-flung half siblings, they bond through telling stories primarily about their late father, whom they refer to as the Old Man. With this, the memoir situates storytelling as one of its central concerns. Ultimately, it suggests that…