The Illusion Of Profit And Easy Money In John Dos Passos’s The Big Money: A Myth Of The 1920’s

Résumé: The end of the First World War signified the beginning of an era of great material wealth and newfound prosperity in America. Such conditions provided the platform on which the nascent social class of ‘New Money’ was built during the 1920’s. In The Big Money, John Dos Passos denounces the ascendance of this class to a position of dominance in American life through its blind race for money profits. He condemns its economic power which, according to him, was undermining the very basis of the ‘American Dream’. Most of the Americans portrayed in the novel are ex-war aces leading a chaotic life and living a daily carnival- a spectacle of human decadence, of moral void, of life that is undirected and loose. They all illustrate the disintegration and emptiness of the new middle class, a class engaged in a destructive race for material success. Abstract The end of the First World War signified the beginning of an era of great material wealth and newfound prosperity in America. Such conditions provided the platform on which the nascent social class of ‘New Money’ was built during the 1920’s. In The Big Money, John Dos Passos denounces the ascendance of this class to a position of dominance in American life through its blind race for money profits. He condemns its economic power which, according to him, was undermining the very basis of the ‘American Dream’. Most of the Americans portrayed in the novel are ex-war aces leading a chaotic life and living a daily carnival- a spectacle of human decadence, of moral void, of life that is undirected and loose. They all illustrate the disintegration and emptiness of the new middle class, a class engaged in a destructive race for material success.

Publié dans la revue: Aleph