An American Tragedy: I'm Done

It is a mighty thing to read a book of 814 pages, and mightier still when the prose gropes and fumbles at you like a 16-year-old boy from the very start to the very end (horny little bastard). I feel slightly proud that I survived it all, although I do confess to having enjoyed at least 200 pages of it. Despite my objections to the prose, however, I feel a bit flummoxed when I try to consider what I think about the story.

The rumor on the street is that this is a story about the American Dream, here understood to be the idea that a person of humble beginnings and low means can, through hard work, become wealthy and rise to a new position in the social order. In this novel, of course, people do nothing of the kind. They are born into their social class, and though they might kill to escape it, they cannot - and most know better than to try. The poor certainly know their place; in Lycurgus, they trudge to the factory and back again without any sign of greater aspirations. Apart from Clyde, we meet only one person who dares to be a class climber, and that is Walter Dillard, a fellow boarder at Mrs. Cuppy's who is shortly dismissed by Clyde as being too crass and too far beneath the family name to maintain as an associate.

And then there is Clyde, our lower-class protagonist. Clyde does succeed in entering the social world of his wealthy relations, but decidedly not through his own industry. He has the family name, and he resembles his cousin, Gil, for which reason, the fabulous Sondra Finchley stops her car and offers him a ride. Dreiser takes great pains to show that Sondra invites Clyde into her world - at least initially - just to irk Gil, who detests Clyde. There is no more to it than that. Sondra falls in love with Clyde's devotion to her, and after his lower-class girlfriend becomes pregnant, he literally kills to be with Sondra, which then leads to his apprehension, incarceration, and eventual execution.

Apparently, by the way, there is a whole school of readers who believe that Clyde did not murder Roberta, a notion I find strange and amusing. He plotted to kill her. He took her to a remote location to kill her. He committed so thoroughly to killing her that she lost her corporeality in his eyes. Yes, at the last second, he shrank from the odious business of killing her, but when he hit her with the camera, his object was "to free himself . . . forever." That doesn't seem terribly innocent to me.

Another odd notion I gleaned from the criticism is that Clyde is the victim of a social paradox - namely, that he is encouraged by society to seek wealth, but when he does, he is punished. As an abstract idea, I love that. I agree that capitalism has many tricks like that. But is the idea dramatized in the text? I don't think so. We do not see Clyde being encouraged to pursue wealth, neither by advertisements, nor by people.

And finally, this work has been praised as a triumph of naturalism, with the core idea being that people are shaped principally by their birth and environment, with no real free will. I don't see that in the text either.

Textual evidence, dammit!

And there it is.