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February/March 1993 | Volume 44, Issue 1
A Dreiser Sampler
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
In describing the suicide of Hurstwood in Sister Carrie (1900), Dreiser adheres to reportorial realism yet achieves a profound note of dignified pathos. The fallen saloon manager has gone to a shabby flophouse and patiently waits among the mass of homeless men until the doors are opened.
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A light appeared through the transom overhead. It sent a thrill of possibility through the watchers. There was a murmur of recognition. At last the bars grated inside and the crowd pricked up its ears. Footsteps shuffled within and it murmured again. Some one called: “Slow up there now,” and then the door opened. It was push and jam for a minute, with grim, beast silence to prove its quality, and then it melted inward, like logs floating, and disappeared. There were wet hats and wet shoulders, a cold, shrunken disgruntled mass pouring in between bleak walls. It was just six o’clock and there was supper in every hurrying pedestrian’s face. And yet no supper was provided here—nothing but beds. Of these, Hurstwood was claiming one.
He laid down his fifteen cents and crept off with weary steps to his allotted room. It was a dingy affair, wooden, dusty, hard. A small gas jet furnished sufficient light for so rueful a corner.
“Hm,” he said, clearing his throat and locking the door.
Now he began leisurely to take off his clothes, but stopped first with his coat and tucked it along the crack under the door. His vest he arranged in the same place. His old wet, cracked hat he laid softly upon the table. Then he pulled off his shoes and lay down.
It seemed as if he thought awhile, for now he arose and turned the gas out, standing calmly in the blackness, hidden from view. After a few moments in which he reviewed nothing, but merely hesitated, he turned the gas on again, but applying no match. Even then he stood there, hidden wholly in that kindness which is night, while the uprising fumes filled the room. When the odor reached his nostrils he quit his attitude and fumbled for the bed.
“What’s the use,” he said wearily, as he stretched himself to rest.
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Dreiser’s Darwinian vision permeates his trilogy about the freebooting capitalist Frank Cowperwood. In this scene from The Financier (1912) young Frank learns a lesson about life from his daily observations of a squid and a lobster living in uneasy symbiosis in a tank at a fish store. One day he arrives to find that the lobster had made its move and killed the squid.
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“That’s the way it has to be, I guess,” he commented to himself. “That squid wasn’t quick enough.” He figured it out.
“The squid couldn’t kill the lobster—he had no weapon. The lobster could kill the squid—he was