An American Tragedy Questions and Answers
An American Tragedy
What is the significance of the title "An American Tragedy"?
The title "An American Tragedy" is a play on the expression "the American dream." That dream is supposedly to rise from rags to riches, or at least to do better than our parents did before us. In...
An American Tragedy
What symbols are found in An American Tragedy?
There are not a lot of symbols in Dreiser's novel; it is a work of naturalism, "the literary movement that believed an individual's life is determined by environment, heredity, and chance; survival...
An American Tragedy
How is the American Dream depicted in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy?
The American Dream is represented in a negative way by Clyde Griffiths' admiration of the wealthy people he reads about and eventually gets to associate with in Lycurgus, New York. Theodore Dreiser...
An American Tragedy
In Dreiser's An American Tragedy, is Clyde Griffith guilty of first degree murder despite Roberta's death being...
Dreiser must leave Clyde's actual culpability vague in order for the 'trial section' of the novel to work. At the end of the novel, one might claim that Clyde realizes that he is not being...