The Near And The Far Essay, Research Paper
In the short story, The Near and the Far, modernism rears its head on more than one occasion. My interpretation of the story is perhaps a little askew of most, but I chose to see the engineer as the American people and the woman with her perfect house the American Dream. The modernists represented a culture of writers disillusioned with traditional American values and dreams. The engineer spent his prime (equivalent to the youth of the generation that came of age during the 20 s and 30 s) working hard and always seeing the perfect little cottage every day. Finally, when his labors were finished and it was time for him to relax and enjoy his life, he decided to visit the dream again. What he found was that the cloud of his life had no silver lining, just as the generation of Americans he represented was discovering. It was living through the worst economic depression in history as well as becoming more cynical.
The title describes modernism as it expresses the feelings of the American public, as their relation to their parents America is concerned. The generation of the Jazz Age had been raised to the same ideas of manifest destiny and good over evil that their parents held dear. When the children became the adults however, they found that life was not as romantic in the 20th Century as perhaps their parents had envisioned for them. They were for a while, closer to the American Dream than any generation before. Home ownership was way up, debt down, and the United States was the strongest nation on the Earth. By the middle of the 1930 s, these same Americans were faced with a terrible situation that got worse as the shadow of war loomed from across the oceans. Even as they had been closer to attaining Utopia, in the American sense, they were now further than any before them.