Clyde in An American Tragedy

just now, typically for Clyde, his sense of self-preservation is so weak that he fails to recall as well how the soldiery pretending to a station above his sustain do a strong retrospective impression on those who had seen him.

different types of repetition involve Clyde's motivations and actions. His whole approach to his dealings with women runs through and through a cycle twice. He rejects the idea of prostitutes in favor of Hortense--trading up, as it were, for a more respectable, classier type of woman. Later in Lycurgus Clyde once again rejects Rita on the assumption that he leave alone be moving in more elevated amicable circles. When no more invitations arrive from the Griffiths, however, he is attracted to Roberta in his lonesomeness and because he senses that she, like himself, feels that the place she has been dealt by fate is moderately beneath her. The third attempted trade up, to Sondra Finchley, proves to be distant more than Clyde is capable of achieving. The early instance of this pattern twisting his integration into the bellhop crowd and resulted in the semi-accidental death of the lesser girl. The second time it results in Roberta's death.

The novel also features repetitions that present the manner in which the world moves relentlessly forward in an almost natural progression with the seeming repetition of Clyde's own story. The opening and closing scenes of the novel offer the most unchewable suggestion that nothing has authentically changed, th

At every step of the way Clyde could either baffle a decision that would change the course of his life or meet people who would influence him to make such a decision. It is true that the forces seemingly arrayed against him argon very powerful. But it is Clyde's pickaxe to enter the car that eventually kills the little girl, and it is Clyde's choice to pursue Roberta, and it is Clyde's choice to aspire to things beyond his grasp when he could, in fact, make a better life for himself without alike much trouble. The fact that Clyde's environment has had a hand in shaping him does not mean that he must leave off badly. It does increase the likelihood that he will never truly succeed, but it does not guarantee it.

In the end it is Clyde on foot who, once again, attracts attention. The witnesses who see him after Roberta's death be struck by the fact that this well-dressed man is on foot. They are surprised because there is a train available. But they stigmatize the disparity between walking and riding which, if Clyde was truly what he appeared to them to be, he would set out done. A driving Clyde might never have been seen by the people around the lake that night. Clyde with a car, of course, would have been a Clyde with no need to kill Roberta.

In battle array to move the story forward Dreiser allows this active effort on Clyde's part which, while it is admittedly another instance of Clyde put himself to be affected by others, none the less is on the button the type of action that would in other cases lead to a higher level of success. Indeed it does lead to a out-of-the-way(prenominal) better position for Clyde, one in which he would be able to improve his own lot if he did not take other decisions that negate the positive side of having a better job and more hopeful prospects. This is the crux of the line of arguing that this is a deterministic universe in which kindly and economic forces exert inevitable pressure to keep the man-to-man down. Had Dreiser wished to demonstrate such an
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