'Tin Lizzie', 'The bitter drink' and 'Architect' from 'U.S.A.' by John Dos Passos

‘USA’ by Dos Passos is a work intertwining fiction and fact, exploring the lives of major contributors to the beginning of the twentieth century, to the progress and development of the America which exists today. Ambition and dissolution are paralleled between the lives of both the famous historical individuals and the unknown fictitious characters.

Beginning after the First World War, the theme is of embraced opportunity, encouraged by a quickly changing industrialised world. 20th century is all about pushing ideas to their fulfilment, exploring new avenues, possibilities and potential.

The way by which Passos animates the characters to a realist level is clever and a subtle way of delivering his message. He has honed in on the affluent and the successful figures whose success was born from creating the all new modern America (mechanized). Close attention is brought to personal details that make people like Frank Lloyd Wright seem more human, and more understandable. He talks of how they are proud of achievements, and ashamed of mistakes, but at the same time how they have shown qualities that have led to their success in life. In doing this he makes the character easier to relate to, they seem more real, and this makes them seem more vulnerable. It is because of this that when characters like Ford spend the end of their lives reminiscing back to the times before their interventions had changed the world, that you start to feel for them more. For Thorstein Veblen in ‘The Bitter Drink’, he ends up in a shack as an old man, alone, and with no interest in being remembered after his death. How can such a brilliant mind end up in this situation? It is because he is human.

All of these men were successful and have been remembered. All of these men are human. Some people measure success by money, some don’t. For some, money makes them happy, and for others it is self-satisfaction, feeling of achievement and accomplishment of some big. The tragedy of the piece is what has to be sacrificed for success (as there is always tragedy following closely behind success) from the loneliness or isolation of a life spent with narrow-minded pursuit, to personal loss, or lack of acceptance from society. It is quite hard to make any specific conclusion from all three pieces. Undoubtedly there are a lot of layers of different meaning in the text, but generally I believe that it is just a display of the sequence of characters and their stories and the reader is supposed to draw the conclusions himself. And there would not be single definite one, right or wrong solution – it depends on what way one choses to go along, as long as the person is ready to take all the responsibility and consequences.