An American Tragedy 371labor, Dreiser opines, they are consigned to aspire
but never achieve and to live bleak lives of quiet
desperation.
In the first of the three books comprising the
novel, Dreiser focuses on his youthful hero’s yearn-
ing for a better and different life and destiny than
the one apparently meted out to him by chance or an
improvident fate or God. Clyde is described as disaf-
fected from his family, who subsist on the margins
of poverty. While his parents are inured to poverty
by long association and see their deprivation as the
road to salvation, Clyde, even at 12, is unconvinced
and mostly mortified; he is perceived by bystanders
as disaffiliated from his parents’ proselytizing mis-
sion. He has a sense that life has something more
to offer. Clyde is emotional and passionate, which
triggers in him thoughts of self-improvement. He
is clearly captivated by the promise of the Ameri-
can dream, an oasis in the desert of daily existence,
and for evidence of his inherent hereditary right
to its emoluments, he has the example of his uncle
Samuel, his father’s entrepreneurial and successful
brother, a “kind of Croesus” living in Lycurgus, a city
modeled after upstate Cortland, New York.
Dreiser offers the reader an inverse gender
example of the pursuit of the American dream gone
awry in his depiction of Clyde’s sister, Esta. While
her passion is to possess pretty things, which is more
venial and less consuming than Clyde’s, it has nearly
as disastrous an outcome. In running away with a
rogue who plies her with baubles, gets her pregnant,
and then deserts her, she prefigures Roberta Alden,
whom Clyde similarly seduces.
In his desire to secure the American dream,
the adolescent Clyde secures work, first as a soda
jerk and then as a bellboy, and he is nothing if not
ambitious and eager to please the patrons of the
prestigious Green-Davidson Hotel. From the start,
however, Clyde’s pursuit of the American dream is
flawed by a false belief in his exceptionality and by
his subterfuge in concealing from his dutiful and
self-sacrificing mother the extent of his earnings.
Clyde’s problems begin when he comes to realize
that the American dream, while it may exist for the
privileged few, is not accessible to him on the scale
he has envisioned. While individuals are allowed to
achieve and to have the opportunity to achieve in
the United States, one would be naive to think that
there is not a social class hierarchy based on birth
and station in life. While it is declining to some
extent, this class hierarchy is still very important in
wealth, in education, and in business. Clyde is dis-
suaded by experience that hard work will receive its
just reward. He comes to understand that the accre-
tion of wealth will take more years than he has to
give to the experiment. Desiring gratification sooner
than later, he looks increasingly for a more direct
route to becoming wealthy and affluent.
The incarnation of the American dream for
Clyde is the young Lycurgus debutante Sondra
Finchley, who embodies wealth, affluence, and a
provocative but cool sensuality in one tidy bundle.
His achieving the American dream would be, he
thinks, accomplished if he could only marry Sondra.
It is, however, one of the grotesque ironies of the
novel that Clyde might have been able to realize
his conception of the American dream if he had
been more assiduous in his work, more careful in
his choice of companions, and more candid with
those acquired. Unable to defer his self-gratification
and curb his rampant sexual appetite, he callously
exploits the affections of poor Roberta Alden,
whom he subsequently abandons to drown in a lake.
Clyde’s rapacious pursuit of the American dream
culminates in his execution for Roberta’s murder,
for which he is morally culpable if legally not guilty.
Perhaps Dreiser is intimating that a monomaniacal
pursuit of the American dream is self-destructive
and death-inducing.
Jerome L. WyantFate in An American Tragedy
The writer Theodore Dreiser most emulated was
the 19th-century British author Thomas Hardy,
in whose work fate was a major element. Dreiser’s
novel An American Tragedy is reminiscent of much
of Hardy’s fiction, reflecting, as it does, the latter’s
pessimistic and nihilistic philosophy. Both Hardy’s
and Dreiser’s characters are buffeted by the tempes-
tuous winds of chance.
Dreiser was as cynical as Hardy, and his view
of life scoffed at the possibility of securing self-
fulfillment and happiness in a world naturally
indifferent at best and inimical at worst to one’s