/lit/ - Literature

White Noise

moby dick

It's definitely Moby-Dick. Huck Finn is a great novel but it lacks the expansiveness needed to be a Great American Novel, in my opinion.

>>9802025

Moby-Dick was the great american novel before (I think at least) that was the grand aspiration of coastal-state English MA mimes. Kind of like how the Henriad and Chaucer are already the great English "epics" (used loosely) when Milton and everyone after tried to create the "Great English Epic".

There are a lot of great American novels, but Moby-Dick is the Great American Novel.

>>9802025
Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, or On the Road.

Mason & Dixon

>>9802025

The moral thrust of Huckleberry Finn is entirely defeated by the last thirteen or so chapters. Definitely not my first choice.

>>9802028

White Noise is written with such affected, inhuman voice that the novel prevents itself from being representative of anything close to a larger American experience. Probably the worst choice out of the three, even with the terrible final third of Huck.

>>9802029

Probably the best choice out of these three, but it almost supersedes the ambition of an 'American' novel. The main foci of the book (Ahab, Starbuck, Moby-Dick) and Ishmael as the outside narrator present a larger cosmic struggle than what the book initially operates on when Ishmael is first interacting with Queequeg in the port towns.

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My pick is the Invisible Man. It examines the lingering tensions and paradoxes of race in America through the lens of the hallucinogenic and the warped. The Romantic lens really is the best means of examining the American psyche, and the shift of location by way of the Great Migration (and the narrator's own experience and reasons for this move) gives the book a larger comparative scope between north and south. There are a lot of people here who meme it because "lol le blacks have no IQ" but no one who has read Ellison would seriously think of the man as unintelligent.

>>9802065
You mean it's not epic enough?

>>9802132
Pretty much, yeah.

>>9802131
Fuck Tom Sawyer. He derailed the story so hard even people who study the book won't read the last few chapters once they study it enough. It's not fun, it's not moral, and it's only frustrating for the reader and the characters. Fuck Tom Sawyer, I'd have punched him in the face if I ever met him.

>>9802159

It's Mark Twain's fault for roping his 'star character' into what is otherwise a semi-serious explorative novel in the hopes of selling more copies. It should stand as a lesson-- Sacrificing experimentation for the proven is cowardly and while it may be immediately popular, it makes for worse art.