An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (i can read book club .TXT) 📕
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Clyde Griffith’s parents are poor street-preachers, but Clyde doesn’t “believe,” and finds their work demeaning. At fifteen he gets a job and starts to ease out of their lives, eventually landing in some trouble that causes him to flee the town where they live. Two years later, Clyde meets his well-off uncle, who owns a large factory in upstate New York. Clyde talks his way into a job at the factory, and soon finds himself supervising a roomful of women. All alone, generally shunned by his uncle’s family, and starved for companionship, he breaks the factory’s rules and begins a relationship with a young woman who works for him. But Clyde has visions of marrying a high-society woman, and fortune smiles on him in the form of the daughter of one of his uncle’s neighbors. Soon Clyde finds himself in a love triangle of his own making, and one from which he seems incapable of extracting himself.
A newspaperman before he became a novelist, Theodore Dreiser collected crime stories for years of young men in relationships with young women of poorer means, where the young men found a richer, prettier girl who would go with him, and often took extreme measures to escape from the first girl. An American Tragedy, based on one of the most infamous of those real-life stories, is a study in lazy ambition, the very real class system in America, and how easy it is to drift into evil. It is populated with poor people who desire nothing more than to be rich, rich people whose only concern is to keep up with their neighbors and not be associated with the “wrong element,” and elements of both who care far more about appearances than reality. It offers further evidence that the world may be very different from 100 years ago, but the people in it are very much the same.
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- Author: Theodore Dreiser
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“Hereby know that we dwell in Him and He in us, because He hath given us of His spirit.”
“For ye are bought with a price.”
“Of His own will begot He us with the word of truth, and we should be a kind of first fruits of His creatures. And every good and every perfect gift is from above and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”
“Draw nigh unto God and He will draw nigh unto you.”
He was inclined, at times, to feel that there might be peace and strength—aid, even—who could say, in appealing to this power. It was the force and the earnestness of the Rev. McMillan operating upon him.
And yet, the question of repentance—and with it confession. But to whom? The Rev. Duncan McMillan, of course. He seemed to feel that it was necessary for Clyde to purge his soul to him—or someone like him—a material and yet spiritual emissary of God. But just there was the trouble. For there was all of that false testimony he had given in the trial, yet on which had been based his appeal. To go back on that now, and when his appeal was pending. Better wait, had he not, until he saw how that appeal had eventuated.
But, ah, how shabby, false, fleeting, insincere. To imagine that any God would bother with a person who sought to dicker in such a way. No, no. That was not right either. What would the Rev. McMillan think of him if he knew what he was thinking?
But again there was the troubling question in his own mind as to his real guilt—the amount of it. True there was no doubt that he had plotted to kill Roberta there at first—a most dreadful thing as he now saw it. For the complications and the fever in connection with his desire for Sondra having subsided somewhat, it was possible on occasion now for him to reason without the desperate sting and tang of the mental state that had characterized him at the time when he was so immediately in touch with her. Those terrible, troubled days when in spite of himself—as he now understood it (Belknap’s argument having cleared it up for him) he had burned with that wild fever which was not unakin in its manifestations to a form of insanity. The beautiful Sondra! The glorious Sondra! The witchery and fire of her smile then! Even now that dreadful fever was not entirely out but only smoldering—smothered by all of the dreadful things that had since happened to him.
Also, it must be said on his behalf now, must it not—that never, under any other circumstances, would he have succumbed to any such terrible thought or plot as that—to kill anyone—let alone a girl like Roberta—unless he had been so infatuated—lunatic, even. But had not the jury there at Bridgeburg listened to that plea with contempt? And would the Court of Appeals think differently? He feared not. And yet was it not true? Or was he all wrong? Or what? Could the Rev. McMillan or anyone else to whom he would explain tell him as to that? He would like to talk to him about it—confess everything perhaps, in order to get himself clear on all this. Further, there was the fact that having plotted for Sondra’s sake (and God, if no one else, knew that) he still had not been able to execute it. And that had not been brought out in the trial, because the false form of defense used permitted no explanation of the real truth then—and yet it was a mitigating circumstance, was it not—or would the Rev. McMillan think so? A lie had to be used, as Jephson saw it. But did that make it any the less true?
There were phases of this thing, the tangles and doubts involved in that dark, savage plot of his, as he now saw and brooded on it, which were not so easily to be disposed of. Perhaps the two worst were, first, that in bringing Roberta there to that point on that lake—that lone spot—and then growing so weak and furious with himself because of his own incapacity to do evil, he had frightened her into rising and trying to come to him. And that in the first instance made it possible for her to be thus accidentally struck by him and so made him, in part at least, guilty of that blow—or did it?—a murderous, sinful blow in that sense. Maybe. What would the Rev. McMillan say to that? And since because of that she had fallen into the water, was he not guilty of her falling? It was a thought that troubled him very much now—his constructive share of guilt in all that. Regardless of what Oberwaltzer had said there at the trial in regard to his swimming away from her—that if she had accidentally fallen in the water, it was no crime on his part, supposing he refused to rescue her—still, as he now saw it, and especially when taken in connection with all that he had thought in regard to Roberta up to that moment, it was a crime just the same, was it not? Wouldn’t God—McMillan—think so? And unquestionably, as Mason had so shrewdly pointed out at the trial, he might have saved her. And would have too, no doubt, if she had been Sondra—or even the Roberta of the summer before. Besides, the fear of her dragging him down had been no decent fear. (It was at nights in his bunk
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