[Below, Rohrberger observes that modern civilization's lack of spiritual values is the cause of individual and societal failure in Farrell's short fiction.]

Best known for his Studs Lonigan trilogy, James T. Farrell writes of the failure of institutions to provide moral sanctions sufficient to maintain spiritual values that define civilization at its best. The disease that takes over when a moral vacuum exists is both personal and social, manifesting itself in the disintegration of character. Farrell's popularity in recent years has diminished, although at one time he was considered to be one of this country's important writers.

As a short story writer, Farrell is better than [Sinclair] Lewis, though Farrell, too, often gets no further than surfaces; still, his range is greater and his tone more varied. "The Power of Literature," is, for example, more subtly ironic than overtly satiric. Hardly complex, this very short story concerns itself with the essential loneliness of people in a big city. Told in the third person and focused through Samuel Lord, the protagonist, the story is based in an ironic reversal. Lord is the author of a first novel having to do with alcoholism and delirium tremens. Having himself been an alcoholic, Lord is able to write the novel with such force that it has become a best-seller and is discussed widely in the press and on the radio. The publishers decide to take advantage of its success by having a large party in recognition of the author. The focal situation is the party where hundreds of people mill around drinking the free liquor and staying until they are all very drunk. At the end of the story, Lord goes home alone, realizing that before the became famous he had been poor and an alcoholic, lonely and unhappy. Now he is rich and not an alcoholic, but he is still lonely and unhappy.

Farrell places a great deal of emphasis here on crowds of people who mill and jam and talk endlessly in excited voices. These crowds are compared with the isolation of the protagonist who soon is forgotten in their midst. At the end of the story, Samuel Lord sits in his penthouse looking down on the streets of New York, which are shrouded in mist. The lights appear to beckon him to life and romance. They appear to want to reveal to him the meaning and mystery of life. But the lights are an illusion. What they reveal is that everyone is alone in the crowd, destitute of values, and poisoned by blight.

With a little more direction by Farrell, "The Power of Literature" could have become more complex and thus more interesting. The protagonist's name is suggestive, as well as the fact that he is a creator, but there is no evidence in the story to suggest the mirroring that would be necessary to carry a substructure to completion. In the beginning was the word and the word has power, but, unfortunately, this story does not.

When reading stories written during the thirties, as many of Farrell's were, one must remember the force of the Depression and perhaps even speculate that social and economic conditions were such that Americans were faced, for the first time, with an image of failure powerful enough to become a backdrop against which was played everything they did or read. Thus ironies in a story would be strengthened not by the structure of the story but by the environment in which the story was read. "The Virginians Are Coming," for example, might have made a more lasting impression on Farrell's contemporaries than on readers of today (though, given another depression, who can tell?). The title of the story refers to a poem by Vance Linden which says, among other things:

Babbitt, your tribe is passing away,
This is the end of your infamous day.
The Virginians are coming again.

The protagonist of the story, Roland, and his friends are the next generation referred to in the poem, but they are making no impact. Roland is already graduated and the others soon will be, but there are no jobs for them, and for the few jobs that are available, they are overqualified. Before graduation Roland had always argued that there were not many Babbitts in the world, but after looking for work day after day and talking to businessmen, employment managers, department heads, and chief clerks, Roland has decided that they are Babbitts, giving gratuitous advice, eulogizing the value of time, boasting and bragging of their own rise in the world, lauding capitalism; all this, when Roland simply wants a job.

"John Hitchcock" has much the same theme. John wants to be a writer, but he is so busy writing reviews for a few dollars so that he and his wife can feed themselves, he is filled with frustration and fear: "He wished he were old, that he were at the end of his life. He thought how the old were the lucky ones. They had so little to go through. They didn't have to face this terrible future that he . . . had inherited." The story ends with John thinking: "Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!" It is, of course, hard to read the end of "John Hitchcock" without being reminded of the "Nada" that ends Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place," but the stories are clearly different. Hemingway's is a microcosm and in it the nada is given cosmic force. Farrell's nothing is tied to a place and time.

"When Boyhood Dreams Come True" is a far better story because in it Farrell attempts not only to present a microcosm but also to use techniques and devices identified more with the twentieth-century experimental and avant garde than with nineteenth-century tradition. The protagonist, a soldier named Tom Finnegan, becomes an American Everyman, and insofar as American racism is identified with Nazi racism, Tom becomes a Western European Everyman who suffers from anxiety and guilt, associated with a set of sins deriving from the distorted values by which he has lived and dreamed. These values have resulted in a nightmare world where people run mazes of every sort, either chasing or being chased, either hunting or being hunted, looking for ways out of the darkness by means of family, church, country, but always frustrated. Central among these perverted values is the kind of crazy ambiguity that makes it necessary for men at one and the same time to be macho and tender, domineering and submissive, soldier and poet, God and Christ; and for women to be loving mother, wife, and seductive whore/angel and witch/devil.

The dream Farrell skillfully presents is flawed only by his apparent belief that somewhere he had to explain that Tom is dreaming. Otherwise, the surrealistic juxtaposition of images crazily coalescing and dispersing to form different combinations forms a picture of a carnival/hell on earth where everyone is fast moving to an absurd judgment day. All life has led to the precipice on which Tom stands, when boyhood dreams are true. The past is dream, the future illusion, the present the space between ticks of the clock.

"When Boyhood Dreams Come True" is a superb short story, valuable in itself, intricate in design, and aesthetically pleasing. It is, however, not regional, and some people might even consider it to be more an example of surrealism than of realism.