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The Far And Near Thomas Wolfe Summary

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Life can sometimes feel like the same monotonous pattern, but we have distractions and fantasies which take out attention away from our boring realities. In the short story “The Far and Near” Thomas Wolfe illustrates the reality of a train engineer in this new fast pace era where life flies by. Thomas Wolfe in “The Far and Near” illustrates a story in which the world 's advancing technology and progress supersedes the the importance of the individual. This focus on technology in turn distorts the reality of those working for this bureaucratic system, especially those who are isolated from it.

The engineers reality over his lifespan became distorted because he has spent so much time on the train that he does not know what the real world is really like and his fantasies do not line up with reality. The life of a train engineer can be a very lonely job because you are constantly moving from one place to another and can never have enough time to make friends and build relationships. When the narrator says “The engineer had grown old and gray in service. He had driven his great train, loaded with its weight of lives, across the …show more content…

Some like the buerrecratic system of the time can affect your life and change it for the sake of progress. The life of an engineer is hard and isolated. This engineer wasted his life without even knowing it and had all of his hopes and dreams set on the sights of this house and mother and daughter and in the end because of his disconnect from the real world is let down and hopes and dreams of a life like theirs crushed. Modernism as shown can sometimes ruin dreams but modernism is not about fantasizing and imagination it is about progress and the realities and pains that come with it and if you do not appreciate the here and now of your life you will be swept along through your life and will only have a blur of what happened in the end like the

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