Zerkow
Norris is quite fond of metaphor and similes as a means of deepening the intensity of character of description. Zerkow, for instance, stimulates the author to near-manic levels of figurative language to describe his greed:
“He had the thin, eager, cat-like lips of the covetous; eyes that had grown keen as those of a lynx from long searching amidst muck and debris; and claw-like, prehensile fingers—the fingers of a man who accumulates, but never disburses.”
Greed
For a novel named after the character McTeague and in which his wife Trina becomes the very symbol of the obsessive nature of accumulation of wealth, it is somewhat surprising to discover that the Zerkow is the only character upon whom the author expends metaphorical intensity. The legendary silent film adaptation of the novel which originally ran nearly eight hours was retitled Greed precisely because it is that condition which negatively impacts all the major characters. And yet for the author, it is almost as Zerkow is the embodiment:
“inordinate, insatiable greed—was the dominant passion of the man. He was the Man with the Rake, groping hourly in the muck-heap of the city for gold, for gold, for gold. It was his dream, his passion; at every instant he seemed to feel the generous solid weight of the crude fat metal in his palms. The glint of it was constantly in his eyes; the jangle of it sang forever in his ears as the jangling of cymbals. “
The Psychology of Evil Actions
A recurring motif throughout the narrative is the phrase “without knowing why” which is used as shorthand to describe acts stimulated by the unconscious will. The novel is quite modern in rejecting easy answers to moral complexities by accepting that it is merely a case of good versus evil. McTeague is way too far away from the intellectual level of his creator, however, and is content to fall back upon the outmoded ideas still given credence by virtue of having always been around:
“Below the fine fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul stream of hereditary evil, like a sewer. The vices and sins of his father and of his father’s father, to the third and fourth and five hundredth generation, tainted him. The evil of an entire race flowed in his veins.”
East is East and West is Untamed
For many reasons, the tale is set as far to the west as it is possible to get on the American continent, but one of the most essential elements for this choice is the way the frontier mirror the untamed wildness of the greed which becomes a life-threatening burden as the obsession increases. Norris is very much attuned to the debate over how much behavior is natural and how much is learned; how much is willfully controlled and how much is too great a mystery to control and his description of setting speaks directly to his characterization:
“In some places east of the Mississippi nature is cosy, intimate, small, and homelike, like a good- natured housewife. In Placer County, California, she is a vast, unconquered brute of the Pliocene epoch, savage, sullen, and magnificently indifferent to man."
Death Valley Days
Once McTeague kills Trina in a fit of uncontrollable rage, his doom is effectively sealed. There remains one wild long shot of a chance, however, and that his making his escape from the pursuing posse by attempting the virtually impossible. If he can just manage to make it far enough into Death Valley, that will take care of the ambitions of the posse. All that would remain is to finish the trek and he is free forever. But just eight miles in, the desert is already wielding its effect upon him:
“The long, thin shadows of the early hours drew backward like receding serpents, then suddenly the sun looked over the shoulder of the world, and it was day.”
