Big Aims It Has Been Essay

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So he does just that, and does just that. The story is telling for a number of reasons. First it speaks to a particularly kind of sickness in the American consumer, in which he was would rather pay some price and feel he is cheating the system by getting a bargain, than take some for free and get the same value for no cost. Also, the father and the son curse a lot. This is interesting because it shows the father and son have an open and interesting relationship, and that the son is learning from his dad as he watches his dad work a con to get people to take something for a price that he would rather just give them. This suggests that the next generation will grow up even wilier about such cons, and the American consumer society will be worse for the wear.

While JDP's story is an example of modernist literature, it has links to earlier works by such writers as Whitman. The catalogue lists of men at work and free-form rambling poetry is echoing of works gone before him. Similarly, DFW's salty, inventive language echoes works by writers such as JDP. In this way, both writers stake their ground in the canon of American literature, but tell their particular tales in a way that seem appropriate to the trends of their day. They are current without being superficially caught up in the literary trends of their moment … such as the need to write long weighty diatribes or lengthy manifestos.

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The stories by JDP and DFW are brief, and to the point. Both take large themes -- war, fatherhood, economics -- and boil them down to a few lines. Both encapsulate popular culture as a means of making a larger point. (WWI would have been as familiar to JDP's readers as garage sales were to DFW's.) In the case of JDP, the point seems to be: war sucks. In the case of DFW, the point is: people suck. If that summary seems too irreverent, the fault lies at the feet of JDP and DFW. They wrote wittily and briefly, making their arguments with a scalpel. An analysis of their work seems to require the same.

David Foster Wallace, "The Devil is a Busy Man," Found in Brief Interview with Hideous Men, (Back Bay, 2000).

John Dos Passos, "The Body of An American," Found in….....

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