Great American Novels

“There’s a place in the world for the angry young man
With his working class ties and his radical plans
He refuses to bend, he refuses to crawl
He’s always at home with his back to the wall
And he’s proud of his scars and the battles he’s lost
And he struggles and bleeds as he hangs on the cross
And he likes to be known as the angry young man“

-Billy Joel Angry Young Man

I think these particular words apply well to the young male characters Heinrich from White Noise and Al from The Grapes of Wrath. This blog post will be a short comparison of the two characters.

Both boys seem to have a slight driving anger which pushes them to prove themselves through any sort of means. And both are around the same age, Heinrich being 14 and Al being 16. This is where I believe the similarities end.

Al is genuinely skilled with cars and usually kind, although sometimes he does get a bit ornery. Heinrich on the other hand is a nihilistic questioner who hangs out with a 19-year-old academic failure who is training to break the world record for amount of days spent in a cage with live venomous snakes. Heinrich frequently clashes with his father in meaningless conversation while living in pretty comfortable circumstances, while Al almost never questions his father even in the midst of growing up poor in the Great Depression. Al is quite popular with the ladies, Heinrich is not, or at least has not been shown to be.

I think each inhabit their respective novels for different reasons. Heinrich is more of a stereotype for the 80s nihilistic youth, while Al Joad is meant to just be a contributing member of a poor family. This is probably why Al is more likable and virtuous than Heinrich.

In the novel Catch-22, Milo Minderbinder is an officer from Minnesota that eventually takes over the kitchen as well as trade of the Mediterranean sea. Milo has three chapters in the novel that are dedicated to showcasing his enterprise M&M (stands for Milo & Minderbinder) and the effect that it has on trade all across Europe.

“The Syndicate” as Milo calls it, is a business that he started where he would take military funds to buy items, ranging from eggs to whisky to cotton, and than sell them to himself, and than buy them again using military funds. On paper, his deals were amazing because it looked like he was loosing money his items were so cheap. In fact, Milo is just equal parts genius and insane making money off of himself because whats good for him is good for the syndicate. While reading these chapters I quickly understood what Joseph Heller was getting at with the syndicate subplot. Milo Minderbinder is a profit chasing capitalist with no morals, much like most American businessmen and their companies. The free market in America combined with military contracts for private corporations turns war into a business of making money, with little regard to whats actually happening. In the climax of Milo’s syndicate it is revealed that he has contracts with the Germans too because “everyone has a share”. Milo and his employee’s bomb their own air strip, killing men, and enraging the country. Citizens and government officials called for punishment, but all stopped when he showed how much money he made off the deal. Milo Minderbinder takes advantage of both friend and foe all just to make a little money, doesn’t that sound familiar.

The bureaucracy of Catch-22 is absurdly illogical. While telling the story of a WWII Air Force bombardier named Yossarian, Joseph Heller writes of many characters and scenes which just don’t make sense.

To start out, Catch-22 slowly becomes an umbrella term for rules that seem more like paradoxes than common sense. Catch-22 is used mostly as a kind of self fulfilling prophecy. For example, the original Catch-22 states that any pilot can be grounded from combat if they are declared insane, but anyone who asks to be grounded is declared sane because you’d have to be crazy to want to keep flying, and thus they are sent back up into the air. The bureaucrats of the military have no regard for the pilots lives, and even when the war in Europe is practically over, they are still forced to go up into the air.

I think my favorite example of bureaucracy in Catch-22 is the censoring of letters being sent back home. In the beginning of the novel Yossarian is in the hospital to run away from duty, but while acting sick he still has to read through all personal letters to make sure no military information gets out. He quickly starts making up his own games and did things like censoring everything but punctuation. When he did this he signed all of them as Irving Washington, and eventually Washington Irving to change it up. Major Major does this too later in the book. He would get loads of letters to sign everyday that would get caught in loops of just signing and sending it back. He found out that if he signed Washington Irving, they didn’t come back.

Through the first part of the satirical novel, I was just about ready to label White noise as the worst book I read during all of high school. That is with other hard-hitters such as Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice (great movie, dull read) to contend with. Here’s why:

There is simply little structure, or plot. I will be the first person to say that I need a novel to have at least some degree of structure, or some reason for me to read it. The book begins in media res, and as the reader I had no clue who many of the characters are and more importantly, I had no idea what they were all doing. There is no conflict, no reason for me to care a single iota about anybody in the story. Perhaps the only entertaining chapter of the first part was chapter 8, in which Jack begins taking lessons in order to learn how to speak German, despite his being fluent in the written language. But this hilarious chapter was interspersed with many seemingly meaningless ones, such as the entire chapter devoted to recounting the day his child wouldn’t stop crying. Why was this chapter included? Nobody knows. Once the plot picked up, I became slightly intrigued, with the explosion, and the toxic cloud that set Jack’s date of death. However, an action-heavy plot was never the point of the novel, so it bounced between plot and ther random chapters. 

Honestly, by the end I didn’t know mostly what was going on. Everything about the novel just seemed irrational (as I’m sure was the point). I was almost hoping that Jack would get so overwhelmed by his fear of death that he would resort to killing himself with the gun he got from Vernon. It would have been the ultimate irony: bringing about what he fears the most, while also dying in the same way as Hitler. It also makes no sense, but neither did the rest of the book, so why not?

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a semi-autobiographical work written by Betty Smith that is set in the early 1900s. Similar to Francie Nolan, the protagonist, Smith grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the early twentieth century. Francie’s story follows Smith’s childhood closely and as she begins to grow up and change, so does the world around her.

World War I and the suffrage movement playing in the background of Francie Nolan’s coming-of-age novel made it historically significant. These events altered Francie’s world and impacted the novel in many ways. By including these historical events, Smith brought the reader into not only Francie’s childhood but commented on how the world was shifting during those times as well. The Nolan family, along with most of America, faced many hardships brought by war. Steady jobs were more difficult to find and food prices rose. Francie was also exposed to gender bias, sexual assault, and the harsh thoughts surrounding women’s voting because of the era she was in. The thought of women’s voting was brought up numerous times and Francie was subject to hear men discussing the anger and disbelief  of this possibility.

Both of these historical events altered the future of the United States and by including them in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Smith contributed to understanding the culture of America during this time period. It also commented on how the U.S. handled these events and brought what they learned into the future.

The American Dream is one of the most polarizing ideas of American Literature. A novel either goes along with the dream, defends it, praises its worth, or tries to shine a light on the many holes that the American Dream has after two centuries of its existence. In the novel Revolutionary Road, the author, Richard Yates, paints a “picture perfect” couple living with their two children in Suburban Connecticut. But even though the couple, Frank and April, are living in 1950s suburbia, the Golden Age of the American Dream, they run into/ cause many problems that make them doubt the authenticity of their lives/The American Dream. As seen through the eyes of Revolutionary Road, I would argue that the American Dream is either dead or dramatically different then what it was decades or centuries ago.

Frank and Aprils lives, according to their thoughts throughout the novel, are very dull and leaves the two very displeased with their lot in life. They had planned to live in New York City during their 20s, and live a generally free loving life while they were still young, and then have a family. Their plan is derailed when April gets pregnant, which forces the two, still both younger than 25, to move to Connecticut to be able to afford to raise the child. To support his family, Frank gets a perfectly boring desk job at the old company where is father used to work, somewhere that Frank promised to himself that he would never work at when he was a child himself. However, Frank and April are very displease with how their lives have gone, and look at the American Dream as empty shell that doesn’t fulfill their wants or desires. In addition, throughout the book Revolutionary Road, both Frank and April are so displeased with each other that they both start extramarital relationships, which snowballs into being more and more problematic as the novel goes on. Neither trust each other, as Frank thinks April questions him and doesn’t love him anymore, and April questions Franks dullness of character. They both blame their relationships problems on the failure of the American Dream, however. it seems that their failures to connect with each other may be more responsible for destruction of their marriage. However, it might actually be that the American Dream what was actually did start the harmful nature of their relationship. The American Dream of the 1950’s was to settle down after marrying, have two kids, guy works a white collar job, drives nice car, and the house has a white picket fence, etc. That is what Frank and April do, it’s just not what they WANT to do. One could argue that the need for conformity forced them to move out to the suburbs, or maybe the costs to raise a family in New York City proper were really too much to bear. The move away from what the two wanted to do with their lives definitely hurt their marriage.

The American Dream is strange topic today. Writers wrote in the 20th century about how the American Dream wasn’t enough, too old, or hijacked by a conformity culture. But most of the arguments used by these 20th century authors just cant be used today, as the US technologically, socially, and politically have radically and rapidly shifted, so much so that the arguments just don’t apply. Not everyone works a boring 9 to 5 job, and with tech, even those jobs just don’t function as the boring 1900s type. More often then not women work outside the home in the 21st century, and suburbia is not always seen as the “key” to happy living. I would say that Revolutionary Road says that the American Dream is dead, but I don’t know if it is. Our modern society is constantly changing, and since a 50/50 split exists in Americans culturally and politically, the goals and ambitions of the entire population aren’t 100% the same anymore.

White Noise by Don DeLillo is a Great American Novel in my opinion. Even though it was released in the 1980’s, it is still quite relevant to our post-postmodern world. The novel has three distinct parts, and is almost symmetrically laid out, with the middle part being just one long chapter titled The Airborne Toxic Event, and the first and third parts consisting of about 20 chapters each. Theme wise, White Noise is about the fear of death. The fear of death is natural in all humans, so while it isn’t a specifically American thing, the steps the characters take to cope and distract themselves from it are American.

The main character and narrator, Jack Gladney, teaches Hitler Studies at a generic college in a generic Midwestern town. He, and his 5th wife Babette, have crippling fears of death, and talk about it quite a lot. The first part, while not moving the plot that much, is a satirical take on academia. The white noise that the novel talks about is a little hum in the background, always there, but not screaming at you. Only one passage talks explicitly of the white noise, a conversation between Jack and Babette:

“What if death is nothing but sound?”
“Electrical noise.”
“You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful.”
“Uniform, white.”

Jack constantly notes the eclectic symphony of sounds around him like highway traffic, coffee makers, and the TV. This racket is what makes up his life; it is the white noise. Jack is so immobilized by the fear of death that he is practically already dead and surrounded by nothing but the white noise. This is what really confused me along with the fact that I think it would be impossible for someone to read this book and not lose their spot because they zoned out attempting to understand how people go about their days not succumbing to depressing thoughts of death. But in reality, America goes about unfazed, or at least that’s how it’s presented.

What is life if not just big lead up to death. It’s almost funny to talk
about our lives being a cruel joke. No real point. No end goals other than to die. Don DeLillo uses humor like how a lot of America uses humor, to cover-up the depressing truth underneath. Hitler studies, wheat germ, and trying to find too much meaning in the supermarket are just blankets we put over our heads, because maybe if we can’t see the grim reaper approaching, he won’t come and peel back the ineffective covers supposed to shield and protect our fragile lives.

As someone with tinnitus, I really like the idea of death/the fear of death as white noise. The ringing is usually nonexistent during the day, but at night I feel like I’m about to go crazy and have to turn on a fan. The fan helps but tinnitus doesn’t have a cure and I know that next time it gets quiet and I’m alone with my thoughts, the white noise will creep back in, starting as a soft buzz that eventually grows into a deafening screech, like it’s preparing for a crescendo that has yet to come.

For this blog, I’m going to be briefly talking about Edna as a mother and how she treats her boys. We learn right off the bat Edna Pontellier has two kids with her husband named Léonce Ponteillier. We quickly learn Edna is the more protective parent and she shows extreme affection and that she cares for these kids. In chapter three the husband checks on the boys when they are sleeping and tells Edna that one of her boys, Raoul has a fever. This concerns Edna greatly because he was perfectly healthy by the time he went to bed but all of a sudden he has a fever? This is suspicious and because of her concern she goes outside and cries until the mosquitoes become too much and make her go back to sleep. As something with Madame Ratignolle and Edna is slowly developing she still makes time for her kids and it shows in chapter seven when she goes on the beach and plays with them in the tent. She begins to learn she is starting to develop feelings for Robert because he is there for her and her kids unlike the husband and when he leaves in chapter 15 she feels crushed. Edna slowly begins to lose her mind a little bit because Leonce leaves dinner to go dine somewhere else and that really bothers her. At the beginning it really shows how focused she was on being a motherly figure and being a good role model for these children but as it progresses it heads for a darker turn which I will explain in my next blog post.

Edna Pontellier struggled with motherhood from the very beginning of the novel and this struggle followed her throughout. The most striking quote appears near the end of the novel:

“The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who have overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days”

(Chopin 300)

I think that the author, Kate Chopin, chose to include this aspect of Edna’s hatred of motherhood and dislike of her children to prove the extent of entrapment that women can face within the traditional roles of women, mainly motherhood. I feel that the severity of her dislike for her children was a bit unnecessary. Although Edna did not wish to be a mother, her children, who are four and five years old, did nothing wrong and therefore do not deserve to be hated for putting Edna in a motherly role. 

Some may say that Edna signed up for this life of motherhood by marrying and having children but in reality, there wasn’t another option for a woman in her community during that time. I understand this but when someone enters parenthood, they have a responsibility for their children, especially when they are so young. When a parent leaves, mother or father, it can significantly impact the children in a very negative way. Edna has a duty not as a woman but as a human being to care for her young children, even if she doesn’t love them or want any part in parenting. 

I’m not exactly sure if this will fit with the criteria for a long blog, but I think I have an interesting point to make. The end of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise is focused on protagonist Jack Gladney’s fear of death, which culminates in Jack’s attempted murder of Willie Mink to become a “killer” rather than a “dier,” an idea detailing two types of people explored by Murray and Jack in conversation. The last real event of the novel is not this climax of murderous action, it is the misadventures of Jack’s three-year-old tricycle riding son Wilder, who leaves the sight of his parents only briefly, and stumbles into a major road, barely escaping with his life. I think this event, as the ending of the novel and the theme of fear of death, is particularly symbolic.

       Firstly, I initially read over this part of the novel with an intense feeling of fear and concern for Wilder. I knew something bad was going to happen to him as soon as I read, “This was the day Wilder got on his plastic tricycle,” given Wilder’s seemingly slow development highlighted by his preference to not speak, and his young age of course. I believe that DeLillo writes this event in a manner as to evoke huge concern in his readers. And it definitely worked on me. But where does this fear stem from? The answer is one of the novel’s main themes, the fear of death. The reader fears that Wilder will die as soon as he enters this dangerous position, crossing the major road, and this drives their concern. I think the whole purpose of this event is to be a final metaphor on the novel’s last major theme, the fear of death.

       Another important element of this passage in the book is the elderly women on the balcony who helplessly watch Wilder cross the dangerous street. They are symbolic of the control over death that is lost as one ages. It’s universally true that as people age past adulthood, they are exponentially more prone to death, and therefore much less in control of death. This is symbolized by the helpless cries shouted by the two old women on the balcony. They are too old and feeble and in a position too far away to save Wilder, just as how as one ages, they lose control over their life.

       Wilder is the opposite in age of these women, but mirrors their helplessness in his own control over death. The time that all people are least in control of their lives is directly after their birth and directly before their death. Babies, toddlers, and even children up to pubescence are naturally dependent on others for survival, just as the incredibly old are. Wilder and the old women are the two sides of the same vulnerable coin.

Babette and Jack Gladney, Wilder’s parents, play a role symbolically. They represent one’s relatives, who also have no real control over whether you live or die, as much as they might want to. Parents embody this trait especially well. They are the ones most concerned about the lives of their progeny, but just like all others, there are factors which they cannot control which truly determine the life or death state of their children.

       This event in the novel also highlights how ever-present and serious the threat of death is. It’s incredibly coincidental and ironic that the son of a man afraid of death has a near death experience after his father’s fear of death is exposed and analyzed. I think DeLillo is trying to do two things here. Firstly, he is legitimizing Babette and Jack’s fears of death, and by proxy any human on earth’s fears of death. This is done through how coincidental the event with Wilder is with his parents’ fears of death. But secondly DeLillo is also stating that, while legitimate, it is useless to fear death because it is out of our control. So many variables affect whether or not a person lives or dies and it is impossible for a person to keep track of them all and counter each one. This is highlighted in the novel when despite all of the danger surrounding him, Wilder escapes without injury. The factors which could not be accounted for, the great control drivers have over cars, the surprising alertness of drivers, and the heroics of bystanders, ended up saving the life of young Wilder, so they shouldn’t be accounted for in the beginning as factors that might lead to his death.

In summary, I believe DeLillo uses this end of novel event as a metaphor for and a reflection on Jack Gladney’s fear of death, but also makes two points about the fear of death, first that it is legitimate, but secondly that it is not practical to dwell on because it is out of our control.