John Dos Passos

A Künstlerroman is a specific sub-genre of Bildungsroman; it is a novel about an artist's growth to maturity. Such novels often depict the struggles of a sensitive youth against the values of a bourgeois society of his or her time.

Un des principaux thème de la trilogie de Dos Passos est le problème d'indépendance de la société américaine. L'Amérique a raté son passage à un âge adulte: D. P. métaphorise cette pensée à l'aide du complexe d'Oedipe, d'où l'évocation de la complexité des rapports sexuels.

"The Camera Eye," autobiographical episodes rendered in a Joycean stream of consciousness. Là-dessus, il faudrait comparer avec Joyce ; certains disent que c’est un style joycien tandis que d’autres nuancent beaucoup plus. Il faudrait simplement montrer la divergence qu’on trouve chez certains critiques sur ce sujet.

It has been taken to be a device which seeks to demonstrate the ability of the private consciousness to survive in the modern world.

The stream-of-consciousness material is not pure interior monologue as in Molly's Ulysses but consists of the constant intertwining of exterior event and interior reflection, in which "the world outside" plays an important role in the world consciousness.

The fifty-one episodes form a kind of novel of development in which the protagonist comes to see his proper role in life and begins to understand it.

The camera eye is also autobiographical for the most part, and illuminates phases of the author's life.

It seems that this section succeeds in expressing the author's innermost feeling about life and people which he could not do in his narrative proper.

Résumé des Camera-Eye : In The 42nd Parallel, one sees him as a child in Tidewater Virginia, traveling in Europe, at school in England, his "four years under the ether cone" at Harvard, his presence at protest meetings and cafes in New York on the night of the entrance into the war.

Apparently, Dos Passos is very sensitive and