John Dos Passos Summary

A SATIRICAL PORTRAIT OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY- DOS PASSOS
Dr. K. Rajamanickam*, Dr. K. Karthikeyan** & P. Dhanapalan***
* Professor, Department of English, SASTRA University, Thanjavur, Tamilnadu
** Associate Professor, Department of English, Dhanalakshmi Srinivasan Engineering College, Perambalur, Tamilnadu
*** Assistant Professor, Department of English, Dhanalakshmi Srinivasan Engineering College, Perambalur, Tamilnadu
Abstract:
John Dos Passos, the most considerable figure in contemporary American Literature, presents the evils of contemporary American society in his novels. He plays the role of a social historian in this regard. The characters of his novels have no inner life commensurate with the outer world. Unlike the other writers of his time, Dos Passos invents a new form by

The subject of a work of fiction written from a naturalistic premise is that the individual does not count. You cannot have a hero in the traditional sense. You cannot have a hero who dominates the action because the whole point of naturalistic fiction is that the environment, or force, however defined, transcends and dominates the individual. The environment, in other words, is your subject, individual human beings, your characters, become simply shadows of environmental force. The point is simple and obvious enough, but the American writer, responding to a sense of the fatality of society, wanted to write about society itself, the whole complex structure of relationships rather than about a single human being, a hero had no developed tradition at hand to assist him in the technical problem of organizing his fiction.
Dos Passos’s attack on the power and corruption of business is essentially based on moral indignation. It is his whole presentation of American society in U.S.A. His rationale may have been economic and political. His impetus, however closely identified with the rationale, was moral and