A Critical Appreciation of Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel - A Restless Opening Page Anonymous 11th Grade

Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel is an eloquent description of the futility of the American Dream, highlighting the anger, desperation, relentlessness and loneliness of the situation. Written in 1930, the start of the Great Depression, Dos Passos through his eloquent manipulation of language depicts the overarching theme of the failure of the American Dream in a manner of subtly, relying on figurative language and lexis to convey his message. The passage is written in a detached manner and void of direct speech and has a clear message running throughout this passage; he intends to highlight the struggle and hollowness of the current American society in the early stages of the Great Depression.

Dos Passos uses selective detail to set the tone of the scene the reader is introduced to in the first paragraph. He launches the reader straight into a busy suburban street description with no prior introduction, giving the overall passage a tone of immediacy or urgency, perhaps representative of the immediacy to find employment and urgency to hold onto a job. Dos Passos focuses on the ‘flicker of eyes’, ‘the set of a head’, ‘the lift of a shoulder’, the way which ‘hands spread and clench,’ enabling the reader to visually see his...