An American Tragedy | Literary Qualities
The title of the novel reveals the author's belief that this story is not a personal tragedy but a national one. Dreiser presents a tragic view of America, and the tragedy of Clyde Griffiths is that he falls prey to what Dreiser considered the fallacy of the American Dream. The American economic system failed Clyde Griffiths; it promised him wealth and opportunity but offered him no possibility of achieving it. Dreiser delivers this message by reversing the plot structure of the typical nineteenth-century Horatio Alger stories of poor heroes who rise quickly to wealth. In Dreiser's...
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