Theodore Dreiser is ranked among our great authors; he was a syllabus mainstay for as polished a master as Saul Bellow. Yet he is neither among the great English-language prose stylists nor a writer of nuanced or profound moral vision. His idea of human life was crudely mechanical and deterministic. When, some years ago, I studied Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, I had something other than literary style or ethical enlightenment in mind. I was interested in how novelists, some committed to free will, others to determinism, succeed in communicating a sense of freedom or lack thereof through the shaping of a story and the description of their protagonists’ decisions. Think what you will of his philosophy, Dreiser makes determinism plausible, depicting convincingly in his novels the feeling of passivity and of being driven by impulse. The man knew his characters and their milieu. Reading him was a self-imposed duty that turned out to be a pleasure.
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