ABSURDITY AND FAILURE in An AMERICAN TRAGEDY and Mc TEAGUE

The connection between the grotesque and American success dream is most striking in the twentieth century, for by then , America had become an urban industrial nation, the dehumanizing effects of the capitalist economy have become pervasive and institutionalized, immigration and individualism have shaken up the entire social structure of the country. Success has changed to the point where it is inseparable from the acquisition of wealth. Norris and Dreiser basically tell the essence of the sinister dehumanizing process brought on by the reach for the sublime. A warm, boundless human sympathy; a tremendous vital lust for life with a conviction that man is the end and measure of all things in a world which is nevertheless without purpose or standards;moral ethical, and religious agnosticism; contact with the scientific thought of the late nineteenth century which emphasized the power and scope of mechanical laws over human desires; belief in a chemical - mechanistic explanation of the human machine; plus a constant yearning for faith - these are the elements which Norris and Dreiser brought to the writing of their novels.