Streets of Night

The characters thus created are pitiful creatures because despite all the verbalization of their hopes and desires, their frustrations and despair, they reach no meaningful communication. In his efforts to cope with his own despair and to realize his own dreams each character is oblivious to the needs of his companions. Ultimately Dos Passos creates a climate of social disunity and disorganization…Dos Passos’ chronological and geographical settings further contribute to the atmosphere of despair and frustration that the omniscient reader, if not the character within the novel, can sense. Streets of Night covers a time span of approximately fifteen years when Fanshaw was a freshman in college until his return from World War I. In retrospect the reader looks upon these years as a period when the last manifestations of Edwardianism were succumbing to a less rigid morality and when women were beginning to exhibit their emancipated ideas about sex and careers. In selecting Boston as the locale of the greater part of the novel, the author not only chose a city which his college years led him to know, but he also chose a city which stood as one of the last bastions of an outmoded propriety in the United States. Nevertheless, the Boston of Streets of Night was feeling the encroachments of a more secular and emancipated way of life that intensified the problems of young people the age of Wenny, Fanshaw, and Nan. Caught between the struggles of a dying Edwardian morality and the labors of the 1920’s to be born, the main characters exemplify the frustration and despair of their age. The main characters -- Fanshaw, Wenny, and Nan -- are basically stereotypes of the aesthete, the frustrated preacher's son, and the chaste New England career girl. Despite the fact that they are types rather than human personalities, Dos Passos makes their desparate condition more real by use of images and recurrent motifs.” –