Well, it was during those days when I was enjoying the Golden Years at the hostel. Though I was not much into literature but somehow life forced me to take to literature as a challenge. And there I was with all great writers Indian, Russian, American, French, in short, our syllabus in itself was a SMALL WONDERFUL WORLD OF LITERATURE!!! (Wow! what a challenge it was).
So, like another day I found one more LENGTHY BOOK lying before my eyes. You guessed it right, it was Theodore Dreiser’s novel. In the beginning, I cursed myself for why I had to accept the challenge.
Like others, I too had no other option but to open the Book called: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by TH. DREISER
(Dreiser first wanted to name it MIRAGE, but later changed it to the above-mentioned name.)
(One-liners about what all three books have to give to the readers):
Book One presents Clyde’s (the central character) early years and his development.
*Book Two deals with his life in Lycurgus, his affair with Roberta and the complications brought about by his love for Sondra Finchley-ending with the murder.
Book Three contains the apprehension, trial and execution of Clyde.
The Story
Written in 1925, An American Tragedy recounts the life of Clyde Griffiths. He is first seen in Kansas City, the child of itinerant street preachers, singing on a corner with them. He becomes a bellhop in a large hotel and there acquires a longing for the luxuries which his family cannot provide. He soon goes to Chicago where, still working as a bellhop, he meets his rich uncle Samuel, a shirt-and-collar manufacturer in Lycurgus and starts him at the bottom of his business, with every opportunity to work his way to the top, who tastes a little sophistication and then hits the road seeking pleasure and success.
But Clyde is not accepted socially by his wealthy relatives until the fascinating Sondra Flinchley takes him up-out of spite and introduces him to the highest social set of Lycurgus.
In the meantime, Clyde had been sharing his loneliness with Roberta Alden, a simple country girl who was working under him in the factory.
Now when he sees a promising future before him, he learns that Roberta is pregnant. In desperation, after weeks of torturing worry he plans to take her boating in the country and ’accidentally’ drown her.
At the final moment he lacks courage to overturn the boat, but chance or the situation produced by the two characters in their particular relation, completes the design in another way. Seeing his despairing, Roberta comes towards him in the boat, he strikes out desperately to fend her off and unintentionally hits her with a camera. The boat capsizes, striking Roberta as she falls into the water and
Clyde refrains from saving her.
The rest of the story is devoted to the apprehension, trial, conviction and execution of Clyde for the murder of Roberta.
The novel is based on the true murder case of Chester Gillette, who murdered Grace Brown by hitting her with a tennis racket and pushed her overboard at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack in July 1906. The novel was banned in Boston in 1927.
Analytical Dissection:
This 930 page realist epic is an American Dream inspired by power echoing Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, James Joyce and William Faulkners works
(Please see the one-liners mentioned above for the reference on events taking place)
An American Tragedy is an human story first-of-all.
His characters are alive and real, moving and acting, brooding with all the desire and fear, passion and hesitation, doubts and contradictions of fully real human beings.
Dreiser could place the moral consciousness not in a character or in the omniscient narrator, but in the reader.
Clyde himself is not perfectly sure whether or not he is guilty? Before Roberta arose and came toward him in the
rowboat, he had certainly decided that he would not commit the crime he had planned.
Luck combines with nature to determine their fates.
The paradox of An American Tragedy is, ofcourse, that machines do not weep over their condition.
Clyde is confused as much as Dreiser himself about one’s Destiny.
Clyde wonders whether God exists and whether he can turn to Him:
Tortured by the need of some mental if not material support in the face of his great danger, Clyde was now doing what every other human in related circumstances invariably does—seeking, and yet in the most indirect and involute and all but unconscious way, the presence or existence at least of some superhuman or supernatural personality or power that could and would aid him in some way—beginning to veer—however slightly or unconsciously as yet, —toward the personalization and humanization of forces, of which, except in the guise of religion, he had not the
faintest conception.
Clydes only defense is his last-minute change of heart, for which there is no evidence.
The prosecution brings dozens of witnesses and traces Clyde’s movements minutely. The peculiar way in which the
’’murder’’ of Roberta occurred is one of the most important facts in the novel. When some kind of chance enters the
action and the boat is capsized, Clyde is given a shock which enables him to allow her to drown. The effect of this
careful description of the incident is to show that Clyde is not the master of his fate.
PITY is the dominant emotion of An American Tragedy Not for Clyde alone, but for the mother who writes sob -sister reports of his trial so that she can earn money to be there and goes on an improvised lecture tour to raise more money for the appeal; and for the poor, ignorant farmer-parents of Roberta Alden; even for Clyde’s weak, incompetent father; and for the poor, dumb victims of the American Dream, everywhere.
It is a tragedy brought about society in which we live. The society is responsible, as the immediate cause, for Clydes actions.
Clyde’s tragedy is a tragedy that depends upon the American Social Sysytem. In his case, the whole of the American Social Order, in its normal activity, is brought into the picture.
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Few Lines on Dreiser’s Life and His Writing Style
He was born in Sullivan, Indiana, the ninth of ten children. His parents were poor. In the 1860s his Catholic German immigrantfather had attempted to establish his own woolen mill, but after it was destroyed in a fire, the family was forced to live in poverty. Dreiser left home when he was 16 and worked at whatever jobs he could find. With the help of his former teacher, he was able to spend the year 1889-1890 at Indiana University. But he didn’t continue after a year.
He was, however, a voracious reader and the impact of such writers as Hawthorne, Poe, Balzac, Herbert Spencer and Freud influenced his thought and his reaction against organized religion.
Dreiser became one of America´s greatest naturalist writers. On the one hand he was a realist, on the other, a mystic, romantic, and sentimental writer. I agree with the critics who say that it is either literary monument or a monumental failure. He was able to move his reader’s emotions.
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