A literary question during the week, just for those of you who don't check the questions during the weekend.
What is The Great American Novel? You'll hear arguments all the time for Huck Finn, Moby Dick, and The Great Gatsby among others, but as usual there's no definitive answer and I need you all to help provide one.
Yesterday's winner: Matty
Drinking, Ray. It's always a good excuse and one that all of our friends will not only accept, but commend you for.
7 comments:
uhhhhh, uuuuuuuuuh, let's go with "Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole. It's good, it's dark, and it's about dumb people. God bless America.
Catch-22. While I love Gatsby and Huck Finn, I have to give the nod to Heller's brilliance. Without this book, we'd still be calling choices with no good solution a pickle as opposed to a Catch-22. The use of black humor in the novel is excellent and it has become one the greatest novels ever written period as well as, in my opinion, the great American novel.
To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. To me, the great American novel means connecting easily identifiable characters to universally "American" themes. This book has it all: a single dad, gender issues, race issues, a strong female character (Calpurnia), rape, lynching.. you know, the usual. What makes this book so great (in my opinion) is the fact that we are shown the harshness of the world through the innocent eyes of young Scout. It's all about looking beyond appearances and finding the goodness inherent in all people. Very John Locke. PLUS Dill is supposedly based on Truman Capote, and that's just awesome.
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Nothing like a little teenage angst to express American Society.
Nicole - how could you not say Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five?
Because Slaughterhouse Five is about Germany...
I'd like to congratulate all of us (very much including myself) for coming up with probably the four most obvious and predictable selections possible. Hooray for mainstream intellectualism!
I'm gonna suck up and say that you haven't written it yet.
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