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... ple, when he moves to Kansas, he seems mellower and more meditative. In reality, however, he just does not have the opportunity to screw up his life. Clyde is a stock character until his last days; he is greed. Regardless of the consequences, he wants more -- more money, more social contacts, more sex, and more happiness (the one thing he will never have).
His pursuit of the American Dream quickly becomes machine like. In a typical novel, there would have to be a dramatic change for a little choir boy to become a murderer. Not this novel. For Clyde, each section of life further weakens his morals. During his early romances, he only courts girls for kisses and uses his money to drink and dress stylishly. Later, he uses influence, looks, and charm, to seduce Roberta.
He uses these same qualities to make Sondra love him. Seeing an easy way out of his dilemma, he kills Roberta. That does not even seem to be a problem for him -- his morals are so lacking that murder is only step above below him. At the end of the novel, Clyde is born again. When Pastor McMillan visits, Clyde -- for the first time ever, and despite the possibility that the pastor might ruin his chance to be freed from jail -- confesses his crime. He begins to read scriptures and thinks that he is similar to fellow seekers of the Elusive American Dream.
He regrets that he could have saved himself many times, but is now beyond help. He wishes he had followed his mother and father, who are happy and loving. Once Clyde trusts God, he dies. Long before Clyde was a character, he was Dreiser's vehicle to enter the mind of the killer, whom he was unable to but wanted to understand (Lundquist 87). Every section of the novel details Clyde's meaningless life and shows his progressive moral downfall. In the beginning, Clyde did not have money, sex, or a social life.
Throughout his life, he struggled to obtain these things, this purchasable happiness and false sincerity that money could buy or rent. On the road to murder, he begged for a job at the Greene-Davidson Hotel; he used his salary to solicit prostitutes, clothe himself fashionably, and date Hortense. Two years before his death, Clyde still did not realize that his life was useless and horrible, a sham. Each of Clyde's traits (lust, envy, melancholy) is a feature of his uncontrollably weak, vicious morality. He never breaks out of the vicious cycle of pain and pleasure (with more pain than pleasure). When he works at the Greene-Davidson Hotel, he is unfortunate enough to catch a glimpse of "high society. " Transfixed, he creates a religion, and women, money, and clothes, are his gods.
While wandering, he happens to meet his rich uncle. This uncle gives him a job with daunting social, financial, and sexual possibilities. Clyde seduces Roberta (a kind, pretty, poor girl), obsesses about Sondra (a beautiful rich girl who expresses her deepest thoughts in baby talk), then kills Roberta (who threatens to take away his position in society). Clyde shows no remorse -- for months, he does not think he murdered Roberta.
Clyde has no thoughts: everything he does is instinctual. Society taught him that material success and material possessions were everything and he, because of his weak morals, instantly agreed. Whenever Clyde was entranced by a girl, he courted her without thinking whether relations would damage his reputation. He never considered how much his whims would hurt his girl. In Kansas City, when he and his friends crushed a little girl while joy riding in a stolen car, they did not care about the childs condition; their only instinct is to run from the police.
More disturbingly, Clyde did not even think he had committed a crime when he killed Roberta -- he killed her because that the easiest way out of his dilemma, the easiest way to in society's good grace. When she drowned, he fled from his obligations instinctively, then "[transformed] his mental and moral cowardice into... "accidental" murder. " That, to him, was instinct. Clyde was more an embodiment of the naturalist movement than a real person. An American Tragedy is the definitive guidebook to the futility of pursuing The American Dream. In its 874 pages of small print, not one character lives the dream that they all sought. Uncle Griffiths really is not a tycoon; only Clyde's biased narration leads us to this inaccurate conclusion.
Sondra is not the most intelligent girl in the world; she speaks baby talk when deep in thought. She is not particularly beautiful; Clyde is attracted to any good-looking woman. She is not super-elite, either; she may have a butler and a lake side mansion, but Clyde's and Dreiser's tendencies to exaggerate -- Clyde for vanity, Dreiser to reinforce his naturalist theme -- have blown her out of proportion. Clyde's women -- Hortense, Sondra, Roberta, Rita, and many others -- are nothing more than pleasure seekers who want more from life. Hortense, as her name suggests, uses boys for money; she hopes one of them will deliver her from poverty. She is doomed.
If Clyde had not chased Hortense, the girl in Kansas would not be dead. Sondra wants to stay socially active, but Clyde's infamy forces her and other elite socialites to move elsewhere. She has no goals and loves on a whim, so she will turn out no better than Clyde's other girls. Roberta is a pathetic, emotional creature who only wants love and happiness.
When Clyde does not marry her, she threatens to expose him. Clyde kills her so he can have sex with Sondra. Rita, a bad girl in Lycurgus, only wants sex. Ironically, she is one of the two content characters in the novel. The poster child for the futility of the American Dream is Clyde Griffiths.
During his short life, he wants only wealth, social status, and sex (together, the American Dream). He wins his way into Chicago and Lycurgus' high societies, is ruined by wealth, and is abandoned. In each city, he has several romantic interludes, which give him a sense of mission and fulfillment for a moment. But, after each affair, he sinks deeper into despair, which corrodes his abrasive morals. Soon, there is nothing Clyde will not do for money, social status, and sex -- he will even kill for it. Each character's emphasis on material success is the cause of tragedy.
Strangely, Clyde's parents remain surprisingly happy. Their secret is religion. Whether it is an opiate (for Clyde), a loose set of guidelines (for Uncle Griffiths), or a binding pact (for Elvira Griffiths), religion gives meaning to otherwise meaningless and chaotic lives. For Clyde, religion provides a sense of unity and wholeness, and helps him realize that he is wrong and ask for forgiveness. Uncle Griffiths's religion is a set of moral guidelines which all humans should follow -- love and justice. (E. g.
Despite his qualms, Uncle Griffiths does not pay for Clyde's retrial, because he knows Clyde is guilty. While his policies are sound, Uncle Griffiths fails. As he said, "mixing business and family is folly; " he trusted Clyde, and Clyde ruined him. Elvira is seemingly the most content, both with her failures and her successes, because she bound a pact with God. She finds solace in the Bible; no matter what may go wrong, she will always have help and understanding. When the novel ends, every main character but her is dead or a failure.
She, however, changes peoples' lives -- even Clyde's and the skeptical DA Mason's. While she may be nave, whenever others fall to temptation, Elvira follows her morals. Despite her son's electrocution and her daughter's illegitimate child, Elvira is not ruined by the American Dream, and all because of religion. A novel's mode is its style (E. g. satirical, romantic, psychological, naturalistic, science fiction, mystery, adventure).
While An American Tragedy contains many psychological insights, its dominant mode is naturalistic. A naturalistic novel is "realistic fiction taken one step further, in which the author pessimistically portrays squalor, violence, sordidness, and characters who have little control over their own destinies" (1). Naturalist writers Crane, Morris, London, and Dresser all even believed that man is "a helpless pawn of his heredity and his environment, a creature caught in a web of causation and chance" (Bucco 7). Despite their occasional successes, all characters in An American Tragedy are failures; they live fragile, futile lives, and never become successful.
For example, Sondra is the American Dream, but wealth, good looks, and a high social status do not guarantee her success or happiness -- her lover is electrocuted, and she is forced to move away. Hortense, Roberta, Ratter, and Rita are doomed from birth -- their poverty will prevent their success. Clyde, however, is the peak of naturalism. He spends a lifetime searching for happiness.
On occasion, he feels whole, but he quickly feels empty again. His stupidity and weak morals, however, guarantee his failure. At the end of An American Tragedy, Clyde discovers that life would have been better had he followed his parents' moral and religious guidelines. However, he realizes that religion will not save his earthly life, nor will his death change the outcome of anyone else's miserable life; people ignore Clyde's failure and suffering, and continue chasing the American Dream.
Destiny and social status, he reasons, will bar nearly everyone from living the Dream. An American Tragedy is a classic -- its moral is timeless. Works Cited "Crime of the Century. " The Chester Gillette case. Online. Internet. 11 October 2000; 19: 49 EST. Available: web "Murder in the Adirondacks: The Cast of Characters. " Murder in the Adirondacks.
Unknown. Online. Internet. 9 October 2000; 16: 24 EST. Available: web "Theodore Dreiser (1871 - 1945). " Theodore Dreiser. 1999. Online. Internet. 5 October; 1: 00 EST.
Available: web "Theodore Dreiser. " Theodore Dreiser. Online. Internet. 8 October 2000; 10: 45 EST. Available: web Bucco, Martin. Cliffs Notes: An American Tragedy. Edited by Gary Carey and James L.
Roberts. Lincoln, Nebraska: Cliffs Notes, 1974. Day, Martin S. History of American Literature From 1910 to Present.
Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1971. Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy. Cambridge, Massachussetts: Robert Bentley, 1953.
James D. Hart, ed. Oxford Companion to American Literature. 4 th edition. New York City: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Lundquist, James. Theodore Dreiser. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co, 1974. Magill, Frank N. , ed. Magill's Survey of American Literature. Volume 2.
North Bellmore, NY: Marshall Cavendish, 1991. Magill, Frank N. , ed. Masterplots: Digests of World Literature. Volume 1. New York: Curtis Books, 1949. Magill, Frank N. , ed.
Masterplots: Digests of World Literature. Volume 1, Revised Category Edition. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Salem Press, 1985. Master the Modes. New York City: Scholastic Magazines, Inc. , 1975. Parker, Peter, ed.
A Reader's Guide to 20 th Century Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. For MLA formatting, I would like to thank Richard Finnegan, whose excellent Academic Citation Style Guide helped me immensely. Finnegan, Richard. Academic Citation Style Guide v 1. 0. Computer Software. 2000.
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