An American Tragedy Summary & Study Guide Theodore Dreiser This Study Guide consists of approximately 47 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of An American Tragedy. For example, Clyde ’s views of wealth are greatly influenced by his poverty as a child. Clyde is depicted as a perpetrator of injustice as much as he is a victim of it. The limbs of the depicted human figures are positioned in vertical, horizontal, and diagonal directions. Clyde turns to Roberta because of his inner loneliness, and also because of his need of bodily intimacy with a woman, which was roused in Kansas-City by a charming flirt Hortense Briggs. Sondra Finchley embodies the American Dream. In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vols. Twelfth Lake. Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Many roots of this tragedy lie in Clyde ’s upbringing. Legends and mysteries have continued to surround the case, which local people followed with cult-like interest. Nearly all of the descriptions of the fictional town match the real town of Cortland, where Chester Gillette worked at a skirt factory owned by a relative. Word Count: 288. Clyde Griffiths The weak but rebellious central character who aspires to wealth, luxury, and beauty — and is electrocuted for murder. Word Count: 554. This Kansas City world is one Clyde considers beneath him, a world of hopeless poverty. New York town that is the first stop on Clyde and Roberta’s journey north into the Adirondacks, where Roberta hopes Clyde will propose marriage to her. God and State, Mikhail Bakunin. At the same time, Clyde has no choice but to desire it. Dreiser's An American Tragedy is a commentary on success and the American social structure. Having received a job as a bellhop in the “Green-Davidson” hotel, the young man who was risen in an exceptionally religious evangelical family joyfully plunges into a new attractive world with good earnings (based on good tips), devoted friends (whom he had almost no hope to find as a child because of his parents’ specific activities), beautiful girls who agreed to spend their time with him, and entertainments which were impermissible by his past way of life or by existing public morals – feasts in restaurants and visits to houses of ill fame. But what makes this novel a classic? Their historical counterparts also stopped in Utica, leaving behind evidence that would later help convict Chester Gillette of Grace Brown’s murder. Submit your essay with conventional font (12 point, Times New Roman) and conventional margins (1 inch top, 1 inch bottom, 1 inch right, and 1 inch left). Dreiser's characters are shaped by their place in a materialist system. Farmers (like Roberta's father in the novel) struggled, as the prices they could get for their crops dropped. In “Poetics”, Aristotle offers his description of a tragedy, and Miller’s play meets these requirements. Salzman, Jack, comp. Duffus, Robert L., "Too Big to Write Smaller," in New York Times, January 10, 1926, p. 24. At the core of naturalism is determinism, the idea that an individual's course in life is wholly determined by some combination of animal instinct, heredity, and environment. The eerie loneliness of the bay in which the drowning occurs is emphasized both in the novel and in historical accounts of Grace Brown’s drowning in the real Big Moose Lake. What turns the son of religious missionaries into a murderer? Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Pizer, Donald. To outsiders, the morality of Clyde Griffiths is clearly questionable, but in the world of the novel Clyde's choices are predetermined. Lingeman, Richard. The leisurely life of swimming, tennis, boating, and golf reinforces his decision to remove the penniless Roberta from his life. Since his very childhood he has been “yearning for a likeness in all things” with the majority of his fellow citizens, placing material values higher than spiritual ones. It based on a real event, when Chester Gillette murdered his girl-friend Grace Brown, which happened nineteen years earlier. The title of the novel reveals the author's belief that this story is not a personal tragedy but a national one. Word Count: 474. “An American Tragedy: Or, The Promise of American Life.” Representations 25 (Winter, 1989): 71-98. They attack Clyde, but they themselves have no higher values. It is a biography of its era. Lake in the Adirondacks in which Roberta drowns when the rented boat on which she and Clyde are riding overturns and Clyde abandons her. He is not "fit," and his destiny is failure. An American Tragedy: Soul Food Junkies. Both An American Tragedy and his first—and perhaps most controversial— novel, Sister Carrie, focus on people who feel driven to conform to social class pressures and forsake morality in order to get ahead in society. Pizer also discusses Dreiser's creation of the work and the influences, both literary and personal, which compelled him to write it. Word Count: 213. Clyde fails to stand a crash with real life at once: having become an accidental culprit of a girl’s death on the road, the seventeen-year-old boy abandons everything (his loving parents, his elder sister in trouble, his job) and runs away from Kansas-city. Sondra is vain and materialistic, and Roberta is self-serving. Kazin, Alfred, Introduction, in The Stature of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Survey of the Man and His Work, edited by Alfred Kazin and Charles Shapiro, Indiana University Press, 1955, pp. Bloom, Harold, ed. Literature Help: Novels: Plot Overview 287: An American Tragedy An American Tragedy has some points in common with Norris's McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (Norton Critical Edition, 1978, edited by Donald Pizer). Many scholars consider An American Tragedy the defining work of American naturalism, and the novel does incorporate all the hallmarks of the naturalist movement. *Kansas City. Boston: Twayne, 1992. The perceptive reader comes to expect the second beat—a sensation similar to waiting for the other foot to fall. 9: American Novelists, 1910—1945, edited by James J. Martine, Gale Research, 1981, pp. This volume provides analyses of important texts in American realism and naturalism along with historical context and critical approaches. The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1981. Even average-income Americans began to acquire conveniences that had been either unavailable or unaffordable just a few years before: cars, radios, indoor plumbing, electric refrigerators and washing machines, and more. They wore short skirts and short hair, and they spent their time dancing, going to movies, and drinking liquor. Thus, Dreiser draws Clyde as an Everyman who is motivated by animal instincts (the drive for sex and for a desirable mate, for example). Adirondack summer home of the young socialite Sondra Finchley’s friends that Clyde visits just before taking Roberta to Big Bittern Lake in the summer of 1906. An American Tragedy delivers its tragic message by presenting a … ‘An American Tragedy’: Analysis of Language and Writing Techniques Gentjana Taraj Aleksandër Moisiu University Department of Foreign Languages, Albania gentaraj.uv@gmail.com Abstact: Dreiser is known among the other American writers for his objectivity in writing and a detailed Log in here. What are the symbolisms found in An American Tragedy? Moreover, like the historical Grace Brown, Clyde’s lover Roberta Alden works in the same factory and lives in another rooming house nearby, occasionally returning home to the rural community of Biltz. This bold statement was uttered by civil rights advocate, Dick Gregory in the PBS film, Soul Food Junkies”. An American Tragedy was first adapted to film in a 1931 production with the same title directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Phillips Holmes as Clyde. The double for this event is Clyde's swimming away from the capsized boat and Roberta as she cries for his help. But he lacked the drive and focus that was needed for success. Both of them attempt to manipulate Clyde in order to survive. Roberta Olden’s tragedy lies in the fact that she, like her harebrained lover, felt enormous fear of facing her parents and society, and was afraid to confess her sin and be rejected. It is set in the early twentieth century, a time when industrialism characterized American cities and when large factories and giant machinery formed the backdrop for the day-to-day grind of city workers. The movie stars Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters, and it presents the story of a poor boy who chases after riches, falls in love with a wealthy society girl, and contemplates killing his lower-class girlfriend in order to have the life he desires. The entries on Dreiser present a profile of the author and an in-depth analysis of his works. In 1923 Dreiser returned to the project, and with the help of his wife Helen and two editor-secretaries, Louise Campbell and Sally Kusell, he completed the massive novel in 1925. The main character of the novel, Clyde Griffiths, is “true to the standard of the American youth, or the general American attitude toward life”. He despised the deprivations that lack of money caused and dreamed of a better life. Much later, Roberta appears as her double, seduced, impregnated, and abandoned in the most terrible and final way by Clyde, who is also an itinerant (neither from nor permanently settled in Lycurgus) and also an "actor" (a deeply and consistently dishonest man who lies about everything from his family background to his murderous intentions). Blinded with his love for Sondra, Clyde hits on the idea of a murder thanks to a newspaper article: however … whether he commits this crime or not, neither he, nor people around him, nor a reader can understand up to the very end of the novel, until Syracuse preacher McMillan draws the curtain on this horrible story.
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