Big Aims it Has Been

¶ … Big Aims

It has been said that brevity is the soul of wit. One might also make a case that less is more when dealing with topics less than humorous. Unfortunately, however, in the modern and postmodern literary landscapes, many writers have forgotten this and have mistakenly equated serious writing with long cumbersome pieces. In John Dos Passos's work "The Body of an American" and David Foster Wallace's tale "The Devil is a Busy Man," we are presented with two pieces written by men who have not forgotten.

In this brief paper the stories by JDP and DFW will be reviewed and compared in order to show that one doesn't have to be long-winded in order to pack a great deal of meaning into the written word.

"The Body of an American" tells the story of an unknown American soldier being killed during World War I in Europe and being boxed into a coffin and shipped home for burial in an unknown tomb. Utilizing a mix of poetic devices and forms as well as prose, the story has the effect of a news reel, relaying the possible events of the soldiers life, and juxtaposing those against images of politicians somberly intoning on the valor of war, drill instructors haranguing their recruits with salty language, and working class stiffs pushing their way through their mundane lives back home. The entire action of the story takes place in less than two pages, but the tragedy of a nation at war and the attendant carnage of lost and broken life is made clear in every line. JDP runs words together to imitate the machine-gun rattle of Hollywood actors delivering their lines and the actual rattle of guns in battle. He suggests the hypocrisy of Presidents who bring flowers to funerals and speechify about the importance of war for protecting democracy, seeming to take pleasure in the pageantry of it all, while the man they are honoring died in a chaotic mix of blood and cracked skulls, surrounded by trenchrats and flies.

"The Devil is a Busy Man," takes for its subject something entirely different. A father is attempting, in the company of his small son, to give away an old tiller so he can make room in his driveway. He offers it to a number of lookers, but they are all suspicious, wondering why he wants to give it away. Eventually he comes to realize that he can get rid of it sooner if he will charge some small price for the piece of junk. 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 & #8230; such as the need to write long weighty diatribes or lengthy manifestos.