ABSTRACT
“The Second Goya” is an allegoric parable in the style of Borges’s magical realism, a literary form that allows fantasy and stark reality to couple without comfort in a reader’s imagination. Centered around the fictional dreams of Hillary Clinton and a British philosopher, Nicholas Rosen, the central image is a cataclysmic vision of America devouring itself. The cultural complex identified, or suggested, is the naïvely omnipotent “Great American Dream,” apparently held by a majority of citizens, that the United States carries the God-given right to govern and consume without heed to the consequences. An enculturated collective dream of entitlement is voted in, fed by paranoid fear and ambition, and writhes with oppositional beliefs and denials on a breathtaking scale. An unexamined dream is not worth living.
