Automobile
The automobile is one of the novel’s most powerful symbols. The car represents a break with thousands of years of tradition as a promise of technology of the future. The speed and carefree manner of driving is symbolic of the Jazz Age and the go-go mindset of the Roaring Twenties. And, of course, the car is also a symbol of Clyde’s downfall resulting from his too-rapid pursuit of too fast a lifestyle.
Hotel Green-Davidson
The luxurious big city hotel at which Clyde gets an early job as a bellhop is instantly transformed into almost pure symbol for the poor boy raised in innocence of religious zealots. The mixture of opulence and corruption become permanently linked in his mind, thus twisting the hotel’s symbolism into something even more sinister as a representation of the misguided morality of capitalism.
Clothing
Once Clyde recognizes the validity of a concept that would come to be known as “the clothes make the man” he goes all out in an effort to dress to impress. But as a dedicated leftist, Dreiser also expands upon this meaning to lend greater depth to the symbolism. Clothing can be used to project a false image, but it can also become a means of having a false understanding projected onto another. Dreiser then magnificently undercuts the power of style as a symbol by revealing how for many clothing is nothing more than a lifestyle necessity that sometimes cannot be afforded. Ultimately, the symbolic value of clothing becomes inextricably linked to questions of identity.
The Camera
Clyde’s view of reality is often portrayed as one consumed by the fantasy of movies. His fantasies and ambitions often take on an aspect of disconnection from the real world by becoming something inspired by conceived through his perception of what the real world is through Hollywood myth-making. Thus, the object he is supposed to have specifically bought along on the canoe trip for the purpose of using as a weapon: his camera.
Starlight Park
The visit to Starlight Park is a minor one in terms of narrative, but one of the richest in terms of its symbolic significance. Literally identified as a “pleasure park” is this old-fashioned pre-Disney amusement and leisure destination which in the very same paragraph is described with imagery utterly at odds with that designation: “a ring of captive aeroplanes, a Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round” situated on “an island near the center of the lake and on the shore a grave and captive bear in a cage.” So this “pleasure park” is one twice defined explicitly as “captive” with implicit repetitions of captivity in the form of being isolated by water and amusement rides constructed to keep one moving around and around in place with an inability to exit. The symbolism of being imprisoned by the pleasures being pursued is astonishing.
