An American Tragedy Summary
An American Tragedy Summary
by Theodore Dreiser
Kansas City, a hot summer evening. Two adults and four children are singing hymns and handing out religious pamphlets. The oldest boy obviously does not like what he has to do, but his parents eagerly are given to the salvation of lost souls, which, however, brings them only moral satisfaction. Asa Griffiths, the father of the family, is characterized by impracticality, and the family could barely make ends meet.
His colleagues quickly take Clyde into their company, and he plunges into a fun new
existence. He meets a pretty saleswoman Hortense Briggs, who however is not going to have anyone's favor only for beautiful eyes. She wants to have a fashionable jacket, which is one hundred and fifteen dollars, and Clyde cannot resist her desire.
Soon, Clyde goes on a pleasure trip in the luxurious "Packard". This car has been taken by one of the young men, Sparser, without permission from the garage of one rich man, whom his father is working for. On the way back to Kansas City weather begins to deteriorate, it is snowing, and they have to go very slowly. Clyde and his friends are late for work in the hotel and therefore ask Sparser to add speed. And so he does, but careless, knocks down a girl, and then, fleeing from prosecution, cannot cope with the driving. The driver and one of the girls are lying unconscious in a broken car; the rest of the company run away.
The next day the newspapers report on the incident. The girl has died, arrested Sparser says the names of all other members of the company. Fearing arrest, Clyde and some of the other leave Kansas City. For three years Clyde is living away from home under a false name, he performs the dirty thankless job and gets pennies for it. But one day in Chicago, he meets his friend Ratterer, who was also with him in the Packard. Ratterer arranges him in the "Union Club" as a messenger. Clyde is quite happy with his new life, but once in the club appears samuel , his uncle, who lives in the city of Lycurgus, New York, and owns a factory of the production of collars. The result of the meeting of relatives becomes Clyde’s moving in Lycurgus. Uncle promised him a place in the factory, although does not promise the mountains of gold.
Samuel’s son Gilbert accepts his cousin with no special joy, and making sure that he does not have any useful knowledge and skills, defines him to sufficiently heavy and low-paid work in shop housed in the basement. Clyde rents a room in a cheap boarding house and begins, as they say, from scratch, hoping, however, sooner or later to succeed.
A month passes. Clyde regularly does whatever he is instructed. Griffiths Sr. asks the son, of the opinion of Clyde but Gilbert is rather cold in the estimation. According to him, Clyde is unlikely to advance - he has no education, is purposeless and too soft. However, Samuel finds Clyde good and he is ready to give his nephew a chance to show himself. Contrary to the wishes of Gilbert, Clyde is invited into the house for a family dinner. There, he meets not only with the family of his cousin, but with charming too ladies Bertine Cranston and sondra, who find him a quite beautiful and well-mannered young man.
Finally, on the insistence of his father, Gilbert finds Clyde less heavy and more prestigious job. However, Gilbert warns him that he must keep up appearances in relationships with women workers and all sorts of liberties will be strongly suppressed. Clyde is ready to faithfully fulfill all the requirements of his employers and, despite attempts os some girls to tie a relationship with him, remains deaf to their overtures.
Soon, however, the factory receives an additional order for the collars, and this, in turn, requires an expansion of the state. To the factory comes young roberta , whose charm Clyde cannot resist. They start dating, Clyde’s courtship becomes more and more insistent, and brought up in strict rules Roberta is unable to remember the maiden prudence. Meanwhile, Clyde meets again with Sondra Finchley, and the meeting abruptly changes his life. The rich heiress, a spokeswoman for the local aristocracy of money, Sondra shows genuine interest in the young man, and invites him to a night of dancing, where gathers the golden youth. Under the pressure of new experiences modest charm of Roberta begins to fade in the eyes of Clyde. She feels that Clyde is not so attentive to her, she is afraid of losing his love, and one day she gives in to the temptation. Roberta and Clyde become lovers.
Sondra Finchley, however, does not disappear out of his life. Instead she introduces Clyde in her circle, and enticing prospects hit into his head. This does not stay unnoticed by Roberta, and she experiences severe torments of jealousy. To top it all it turns out that she is pregnant. She says that to Clyde, and he frantically tries to find a way out of this situation. But drugs do not bring the desired result, and the doctor, whom they find so hard, categorically refuses to do an abortion.
The only way out - to get married, absolutely does not satisfy Clyde. After all, this means that he will have to give up dreams of a brilliant future instilled by the relationship with Sondra. Roberta is desperate. She is ready to tell about what had happened to Clyde’s uncle. This would mean an end to his career, and the cross on the affair with Sondra.. He promises Roberta to find some doctor, or marry her, even formally, and maintain her for a while, until she can work again.
But here sees in a newspaper an article that tells about the tragedy at Pass Lake - a man and a woman took a boat, but the next day the boat was found upside-down, and later the girl's body was found, but the man did not show up. This story makes strong impression on him, especially since he received a letter from Roberta, who had gone to her parents: she is not going to wait any longer, and promises to return to Lycurgus and to tell the elder Griffiths. Clyde realizes that he has no time to spare, and he has to take a decision.
Clyde invites Roberta to make a trip to Big Bittern, then promises to marry her. So it seems that a terrible decision is made, but he himself does not believe that will find the strength to carry out his plan. It's one thing to commit murder in the imagination, and quite another - in reality.
And Clyde and Roberta go boating on a deserted lake. Clyde’s thoughtful look scares Robert, she carefully sits beside him, asks what had happened. But when she tries to touch him, he hits her and pushes so that she loses the balance and falls. The boat turns over, and hits Roberta. She begs Clyde to help her, but he is inactive. He goes to the bank alone, without Roberta.
But Roberta’s body is quickly found. The investigator Haight and prosecutor Mason vigorously take the case and soon come to Clyde. He initially pretends to know nothing, but for an experienced prosecutor it is not difficult to corner him. Clyde is arrested - now his fate will be decided at the court.
Samuel Griffiths, of course, is shocked by what has happened, but nevertheless hires good lawyers. Those are fighting tooth and nail, but Mason knows his business as well. A long and tense trial ends with the imposition of the death penalty. Wealthy family cease to assist Clyde and only his mother is trying to do something for him.
Clyde is transferred to Auburn prison, called the House of Death. Desperate attempts by his mother to find the money to continue the fight for the life of her son do not bring success. Society has lost interest in the condemned, and now nothing will prevent the machinery of justice from finishing its job.
An American Tragedy
An American Tragedy was published in December 1925, and issued in two volumes. Dreiser created a poignant yet powerful novel of youthful loneliness in industrial society and of the American mirage that beckons some of the young to disaster.
For years Dreiser had been collecting news accounts about desperate young men who had tried to rid themselves of passing love affairs by violence. The case of Chester Gillette particularly fascinated him. In Herkimer County, New York, in 1906, Gillette lured his pregnant sweetheart, Grace Brown, to Big Moose Lake and drowned her. Discovered and apprehended almost immediately, Gillette was electrocuted at Auburn Penitentiary in March 1908.
In voluminous detail, Dreiser tells the bewildering story of Clyde Griffiths, a son of evangelists, who takes a job as a bellhop, is involved in an automobile accident, escapes to another city, finds work in his uncle's factory, divides his affection between a factory girl and a socialite, entices the pregnant factory girl to a lake, lets her drown, and is himself tried, sentenced, and electrocuted.
For this story, Dreiser scrutinized the official court records and the many newspaper reports of the Gillette-Brown case, explored Herkimer County, and inspected Sing Sing, gathering thousands of impressions and details.
The chief tenet of such literary naturalists as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser is that man is a helpless pawn of his heredity and his environment, a creature caught in the web of causation and chance. Although Clyde has seemingly successful moments, his life is basically one of suffering. Because of his deficient thought and weak will, Clyde is the protagonist-victim not of a "tragic" but of a "pathetic" plot, and in keeping with the naturalistic-pathetic plot, human frailty and futility pervade An American Tragedy.
Both the "pathetic" individual and the "tragic" civilization loom large in this novel. In Kansas City, Denver, and San Francisco, we see the Griffithses in a society whose organic community has declined. Clyde's class snobbery is an outgrowth of individualism and urbanization. And we see in Clyde the decline of belief, the growth of the secular ethic, and the fragmentation of his personality.
Although its classic one hundred chapters are divided into three disproportionate books of nineteen, forty-seven, and thirty-four chapters, the ponderous whole is tensely unified. Dreiser's fictional cosmos of indifference toward puny, struggling man reveals the contrast between the weak, the poor, and the ugly and between the relatively strong, rich, and beautiful. Again, he contrasts the photographic world-as-it-is with the visionary world-as-it-might-be. Because of Dreiser's bold contrasts, systematic ambiguity, and uneasy mixture of scientific notions and compassionate feelings, critics often argue whether or not Dreiser was a "naturalist," a "realist," or an old-fashioned "romantic." Indeed, his descriptions of subjective states compel as much attention as do his documentaries of material surfaces — and both penetrate beneath simple appearance. Aesthetically, his vast network of dramatic contrast makes for fascinating ironies, foreshadowings, and parallels, all of which contribute to the book's unity.
From time to time the reader will note in Dreiser's prose certain crudities and repetitions. Our literary sensibilities might even be offended when, for example, we see Clyde Griffiths "beat a hasty retreat . . ." or when the omniscient narrator informs us that certain emotions "now transformation-wise played over his countenance . . ." or when a young girl wears "two small garnet earrings in her ears" or when a chapter begins: "Yet a thought such as that of the lake, connected as it was with the predicament by which he was being faced, and shrink from it though he might, was not to be dismissed as easily as he desired."
To be sure, most of Dreiser's sentences do not conform to the ideal set forth in, say, Strunk and White's Elements of Style. Yet Dreiser's prose on the whole renders the illusion of the ordinary world with extraordinary fidelity. Significantly, claims have been advanced that Theodore Dreiser is one of the world's best worst writers, and that he is an impurist with nothing but genius