Manhattan Transfer Summary

Ellen Thatcher is born to Ed Thatcher, an accountant, and his wife Susie. Meanwhile,Bud Korpenning arrives in New York by boat, ready to get a job and make a living.George Baldwin, a frustrated young lawyer, hears of a milkman being hit by a train car and takes on the case. The milkman is Gus McNeil; his wife Nellie begins an affair with the smitten Baldwin. Jimmy Herf, a young boy, arrives in the city with his mother Lily, who suffers a stroke and dies soon thereafter. Jimmy is left in the care of his aunt and uncle, who would like to see him go to Princeton or Yale and attain financial success. Jimmy, however, has other plans, and goes into journalism. By this point, Bud has thrown himself off the Brooklyn Bridge in desperation and Ellen has become an actress on the New York stage. She is quite the sensation, and the suitors begin to pile up. Meanwhile, Joe Harland, an older cousin of Jimmy's and a man who was once highly successful in the stock market, has become an impoverished drunkard. Stan Emery, a new character, is likewise a hard drinker -- a Harvard student thrown out of his school and prone to raising Cain about town. He and Ellen, who is married to John Oglethorpe, begin a heated affair, while Jimmy, a friend of Stan's, looks on. Baldwin has also fallen for Ellen. Gus McNeil, now a wealthy man and a rising politico, tries to persuade him to run for office, but Baldwin shies away from the idea. He seems more focused on other matters -- his practice, the difficult situation with his estranged wife Cecily, and his deepening love for Ellen. Finally he collapses in a fit of jealousy and pulls a gun on the ever-flirtatious Ellen in a roadhouse. By now World War I has broken out, and Jimmy expresses his desire to go to Europe. Meanwhile, Stan impulsively marries a girl named Pearline, thereby breaking Ellen's heart. Not long after, the young man dies in a fire. We learn that Ellen is pregnant with his baby and is determined to have it and raise it. When we next meet the characters, World War I is over and the soldiers -- among them Jimmy's cousin James Merivale -- are returning home. Jimmy and Ellen have married while in Europe together, and they sail to New York with the baby Martin -- Stan's son, we presume. Meanwhile, Baldwin has decided to run for office on a reform ticket, a decision which angers the reactionary Gus McNeil. It is the era of Prohibition, and Congo Jake, a French sailor and a friend of Jimmy's, has made a massive amount of money through bottlegging. Near the novel's end, we meet Congo again -- now named Armand Duval and a Park Avenue millionaire. His rise to wealth is mirrored by the downward spiral of Dutch Robertson, a returning veteran who is driven to crime by poverty and is sentenced to twenty years in prison. All is not well for Ellen and Jimmy, whose marriage seems to be quickly crumbling. Jimmy demands Ellen, who has quit the stage, if she still loves him; she tells him "no." Jimmy throws away his job as a journalist and professes to friends his plans to leave the city. He and Ellen divorce, she marries George Baldwin, and the last we see of Jimmy is the beginning of his long trip away from New York.

Major Themes
Capitalism Perhaps more than anything else, Manhattan Transfer can be read as a fervent critique -and, in places, denunciation -- of American capitalism. Though Dos Passos would later renege on the more radical implications of this novel, and many of his other works of the time, in 1925 he was a full-fledged leftist, and here he lets out a cry of anger. From Blackhead's corruption to Gus McNeil's turning his back on the class of which he was once a part; from Bud Korpenning's inability to carve out a life for himself to Stan's demise

under the pressure of too much wealth; from returning soldier Dutch Robertson's twenty years in prison for stealing money to Ed Thatcher's shattered hopes of reaching beyong what he perceives as his lower middle-class mediocrity, Dos Passos's novel is replete with examples of capitalism's excesses, crimes, and oversights -- so much so that when Jimmy Herf finally calls it quits to his job and New York, one is likely to agree with his decision. Love Most of the characters in the novel are searching, in one way or another, for love. In this respect, Ellen floats through the narrative, the object of desire of so many men, like a Hollywood screen siren -- seemingly untouchable, statuesque, yet troubled and insecure within. She drives Goldweiser to offer her a career, Baldwin to pull out a gun, and Jimmy to pound on her door in desperation. Never does she seem to actively instigate any of this behavior; rather, it is an already existent need for love which finds in Ellen the perfect reflection. There is also Anna Cohen, dreaming of a life with Elmer; Pearline, running to her husband's defense; Florence, reminiscing about a youth spent with Jack; Emile, trying to stoke Madame Rigaud's jealousy so that she will love him; and countless other examples. Dos Passos suggests, through his writing, that what unifies the disparate characters of his vast tapestry is, above all else, a need to love and be loved -- a need which, even for Ellen (who loses her one true love to a deadly fire), is seldom satisfied. War World War I obviously plays a major role in Manhattan Transfer, just as it deeply marked Dos Passos's own life. That said, we remain confined to New York. We never see the carnage of the war firsthand. Nor do we observe the experience of the shellshocked veteran, an experience which Virginia Woolf treats in detail in Mrs. Dalloway, another seminal work in which the Great War looms in the distance. The returning soldiers in Dos Passos's novel are not so much haunted by memories of the war -- indeed, James Merivale makes a habit of calling it "a great war while it lasted" -- as dismayed at their homecoming. Jobs remain scarce; the gap between rich and poor has not been bridged by a war that is often interpreted as having spelt the death-knell for aristocracy. In many ways, New York remains a feudal society, an aristocracy of capitalism, and the war continues -- as Elmer argues to Anna in the ice cream shop. The battle that really matters is not between nations but between classes. The Press When one considers just how many major historical events are communicated through newspaper headlines inManhattan Transfer -- such as the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the economic depression following the War (a small panic which helped pave the way for the Great Depression years later) -- it becomes clear that the issue of the press and its role in society is one very important to Dos Passos. Not coincidentally, Jimmy Herf is a journalist himself, one who finds increasing difficulty in publishing his leftist-leaning articles. Newspapers are one of the ways in which characters in the novel and inhabitants of the city are connected: Jimmy sees Ellen's photo in the paper Joe Harland drops and is lost in reverie for a moment; Dutch Robertson reads of a successful hold-up in a journal, while Jimmy later reads of Dutch's arrest in another; James Merivale's narrative meets Phineas Blackhead's when the former reads of the latter's financial scandal. Just as Dos Passos uses words to paint his portrait of New York, the text of the various newspapers -- The Wall Street Journal and The Timesfigure most prominently -- creates a conglomerate network that connects one moment to another, unifying the characters, historical events, and subplots into a cohesive whole. Language spans time and space in Dos Passos's world, and the printed word offers the means by which the totality of a complex universe can be perceived and perhaps understood. Death Two major deaths punctuate Manhattan Transfer, and they are both suicides: Bud's and Stan's. Paired together, these deaths point to a larger tragedy. New York, in its heedless rush toward modernization, leaves scores of victims, casualties of a war without a name - a war that, in Dos Passos' writing, seems even more devastating than World War I.

Stan's death prefigures Anna Cohen's near-fatal accident, just as Uncle Jeff's deadly case of influenza echoes Lily Herf's stroke. One need only point to the numerous instances of tenement buildings set afire, car crashes, and reports of murders to argue that death occupies a central position in Dos Passos's vision of New York -- sometimes hovering in the dark, as the young Ellen and Martin imagine it when alone in their beds at night, and other times leaping into the foreground and claiming yet another victim. The Stage It is not insignificant that so much of Manhattan Transfer deals with the theater and the lives of its performers. Cassandra, Nevada, Ruth, Ellen, and Goldweiser all have ties to the stage. Like journalism, the field itself seems to function as a metaphor for larger societal issues. The way Dos Passos often describes it, New York is a kind of stage, showered with various colors, pools of light and pits of darkness, in which the skyscrapers and bridges often seem more like painted backdrops than edifices of stone. There is indeed a phantasmagoric quality to the writing, rendering the great city a dreamy, fantastical entity -- a wintry kingdom to Ellen's young, vivid imagination and a nightmarish cesspool of crime, poverty, and desperation in later years. The theater is a site of illusions, and thus offers both an escape from and an amplification of the reality of New York. Time Dos Passos's narrative spans a considerable stretch of time. Early passages offer glimmers of the pre-twentieth-century city; soon enough, the Gilded Age and the era of the skyscrapers and the movie hall are in full swing; World War I appears on the stage, ushering in Prohibition and the Jazz Age, the time at which Dos Passos wrote the book. History is often compressed into telling moments; in other instances, time is suspended, as when Phil Sandbourne sees the girl in the cab or Jimmy sees Ellen's photo in the paper. Dos Passos bends and plays with time at will, projecting his characters' emotions and his own political convictions onto the fabric of his (hi)story. The City The city is a character in itself, perhaps the hero of Dos Passos's novel -- though by necessity a tragic hero. We never leave New York or its environs. World War I occurs offstage; Jimmy and Ellen's marriage is skipped. The novel more or less begins with Bud entering the city. It ends with Jimmy leaving it. The last line, "Pretty far," directs our attention beyond New York's bounds and the end of the narrative, to a world outside the island -- a world which Dos Passos would later exhaustively describe in his greatU.S.A. trilogy.

Character List
Jimmy Herf Born into wealth, the son of Lily Herf, who dies of a stroke when Jimmy is a boy. He is taken in by his aunt and uncle, who try to groom him for financial success, but he rebels and turns to journalism, through which he grows into a radical bristling with anger at capitalist injustice. Hopelessly in love with Ellen, he finally marries her during World War I. Ellen When we first meet her, she is a newborn baby: Ellen Thatcher. Later she becomes Ellen Oglethorpe, then Ellen Herf, and finally Ellen Baldwin. Her friends and acquaintances call her by a variety of names: Ellie, Elaine, Helena, and, yes, Ellen. The daughter of businessman Ed Thatcher, she is close to her father as a child, and seems to search for a father figure in the numerous men with whom she has affairs. A successful actress, she abruptly quits the stage. Though loved by more men than she can count, the only one she seems to truly love in return is Stan Emery, whose baby she has and raises with Jimmy. Martin

Ellen and Jimmy's son. His biological father is Stan Emery. Stanwood Emery Son of a wealthy businessman, Stan is a rebellious Harvard student who drinks as if there were no tomorrow. He impulsively marries a girl named Pearline and, in a drunken stupor, dies in a fire. Ed Thatcher Father of Ellen, whom he loves dearly. A stolid businessman, Ed believes in carving out his own success, in slowly pulling himself to the top. He shies away from risk. At the same time, he is embarrassed by his lack of wealth, his mediocrity, and at one point fantasizes about a swarm of dollar bills flying over the city. Susie Thatcher Ellen's mother. She does not seem to love her daughter, nor her husband for that matter. Sickly, often bed-ridden, constantly angry. George Baldwin A struggling lawyer who climbs his way to the district attorney's office and finally to a mayoral race. At heart an idealist, Baldwin becomes a Reform candidate by the novel's end, turning his back on Gus McNeil and other reactionary friends of his. Like Jimmy, he is deeply in love with Ellen, and finally wins her hand in marriage after his divorce with his long-estranged wife Cecily. Gus McNeil A milkman when we first meet him, Gus is hit by a train car and wins a good deal of money in the resulting suit (largely thanks to Baldwin, who impulsively takes on the case). He enters the political arena and tries to persuade Baldwin to run for office. It is a slap in his face when Baldwin begins his own campaign -- on a Reform ticket. Nellie McNeil Gus's wife. She and Baldwin have a short-lived affair early in the novel. Phil Sandbourne An architect and a great admirer of Stanford White's, Phil Sandbourne is full of ideas for his city, including a method of easily making colored tile. A romantic and an idealist, Phil is hit by a car and severely injured when he catches the gaze of a girl passing by in a taxicab. Joe Harland Once called the Wizard of Wall Street and the King of the Curb because of his success on the market, Joe Harland is now a middle-aged drunkard, reduced to begging family members for change. Jeff Merivale Jimmy's uncle. Dies in the influenza epidemic. Emily Merivale Jimmy's aunt, Lily's sister. Maisie Merivale Jimmy's cousin, Maisie later marries Jack Cunningham. James Merivale Maisie's brother, James is, in contrast to his cousin Jimmy, deeply concerned with material wealth and social success. After returning from World War I -- calling it a "great war while it lasted" -- he quickly gets a job at a bank and works his way up the ladder. Jack Cunningham A publicist for Famous Players, Jack marries Maisie. James distrusts him at first, but soon enough accepts him as a profitable connection for the family.

Joe O'Keefe A sergeant in World War I, Joe O'Keefe is involved in workers' politics in the city, and laments the lack of jobs for returning veterans. Dutch Robertson Another World War I veteran, Dutch sinks to such levels of poverty that he decides to resort to crime when he reads of a successful hold-up in the paper. Francie Dutch Robertson's girlfriend. Anna Cohen A young Jewish girl who drifts from man to man. Thrown out of her home by her mother, for having picketed in a workers' strike. Elmer Anna's boyfriend. A radical, a believer in the impending Revolution, Elmer convinces her to partake in the garment workers' strike. Cecily George Baldwin's estranged wife. Though Baldwin leaps into one affair after another, it takes years before Cecily finally agrees to a divorce. Ruth Prynne An aspiring actress, Ruth is in a relationship with Jimmy when we first meet her -though what exactly that "relationship" consists of is never entirely clear. She befriends Ellen and envies her great success on the stage -- success which continually eludes the unlucky Ruth. Cassandra Wilkins Weepy and barely articulate, Cassandra is another of Ellen's friends. She often unloads her romantic troubles on Ellen, though never intending any harm; she is at heart an innocent, and wants desperately to believe in the purity of love. Phineas Blackhead The corrupt head of an import and export firm. Densch An associate of Blackhead's, who defies him on grounds of "a citizen's duty." Bud Korpenning A young man from the country who enters New York with hopes of making a living and escaping his rural past (he killed his abusive father, we learn). All his dreams meet with failure, and he ends his life by jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge. Gladys Blackhead's devoted daughter. Emile A French sailor, Emile quits the service -- and France itself, so to speak -- and makes a home in New York. Though a recurrent character early in the novel, Emile does not make any significant appearances after he begins to live with Madame Rigaud, the owner of a delicatessen and also from France. Congo Jake A friend of Emile's and a fellow sailor with a leg of cork, Congo Jake makes a massive amount of money during Prohibition through bootlegging. When we last meet him he is "Armand Duval," a wealthy Park Avenue gentleman, married to Nevada Jones. Nevada Jones Another creature of the theater, Nevada has an affair with Baldwin, then turns her attention to Tony Hunter, with whom she performs in vaudeville routines, then finally

becomes Congo/Duval's wife. Spiteful of many of the men in her life, she is a highspirited and highly sexed individual. Tony Hunter Tortured by his homosexuality, Tony Hunter, an actor, struggles to rid himself of his "problem" through psychoanalysis. For a time, the procedures seem to work, and Tony begins to live and perform with Nevada Jones. Soon enough, however, he suffers a nervous collapse, at which point Nevada promptly leaves him. Madame Rigaud The willful and thick-accented French owner of a delicatessen and confiteserie, Rigaud wins the affection of the young Emile. Pearline Stan Emery's wife. An innocent girl, Pearline earnestly believes in her husband's ambition, and that his days of drinking and doing little else will soon be over. John Oglethorpe Ellen's first husband, whom she refers to as Jojo. A respectable man, he puts up with many of Ellen's infedilities, before finally erupting outside Stan Emery's apartment window in a drunken furor. Harry Goldweiser A friend of Ellen's and her professional consultant. He seems to be an agent at first, then declares his ambitions of producing. Whatever his particular role, he is a crucial behindthe-scenes presence in Ellen's life, helping her rise to the top of the New York theater world. Lily Herf Jimmy's mother -- a wealthy, beautiful, but fragile and sickly woman. She dies of a stroke while Jimmy is still a boy, recalling Dos Passos's mother's own death. Florence Claims to be Jack Cunningham's legal wife -- which creates a minor scandal, when Jack asks Maisie for her hand, but one that is quickly dispelled.

Glossary of Terms
brocade elaborately designed fabric burthen burden (archaic) fetor stench jowl jaw or cheek manhole a hole leading to a sewer or drain, usually on a city street nickelodeon an early kind of movie theater where customers would pay a small amount to watch a quick film or variety show Nineveh a biblical city and the capital of Assyria.

First Section, Chs. I-III

Summary
I. "FERRYSLIP"
A nurse carries a baby in a basket into a "big dry hot room with greenish distempered walls." Bud Korpenning, a young man looking for work, sits on the deck of a ferry coming into Manhattan. As soon as he is on land, he orders some food at a nearby lunchwagon. The man behind the counter suggests to Bud that he get a haircut and a shave if he wants to get a job in New York. "It's looks that count in this city," he explains. Ed Thatcher, an accountant anticipating certification, waits nervously in a hospital while his wife Susie gives birth to their first child - Ellen. After the baby is born, Ed tries to calm down his delirious wife, who claims that the child is not hers and that the nurse has stolen her true baby. A bearded man in a derby notices an advertisement on the window of a drugstore on Canal St. It is an image of a clean-shaven, proper-looking gentleman, accompanied by the text: "King C. Gillette" and "No Stropping No Honing." The man buys a Gillette razor at the store, and at home gives himself a shave.

II. "METROPOLIS"
Back at home, Ed Thatcher notices a Journal headline: "Morton Signs the Greater New York Bill: Completes the Act Making New York World's Second Metropolis." Beaming with excitement, scoffing at his old father who wanted him to stay in the "ole fool store in Onteora," Thatcher hears shouts outside. There is a fire. He watches the spectacle: a nearby tenement building all aflame. In the crowd he notices the "firebug" - the man who started the fire and who now waits around to watch it. A man named Mr. Perry explains to a real estate developer the new opportunities that have arisen in the city, now that it is officially the world's "second." Bud, following advice, goes to a barbershop. There he reads in a paper of a kid admitting to murdering his crippled mother. Ed Thatcher sits with his wife Susie, while their daughter Ellen plays. A few years have passed since the birth apparently. The parents chastise little Ellen for tearing up a newspaper with her dancing. A young man excitedly tells his sweetheart, a girl named Emily, that he has just received a raise at work. She is unimpressed. Emile, a cabin boy on a French ship, talks with his shipmate Congo (nicknamed for his dark skin). We learn they are in military service, as is required of all French men. They entertain the idea of going ashore and abandoning the service - and, implicitly, their country. The possibility of making a home in America is a tantalizing one. As Emile explains, "[Here] it's the coin they're after. They dont want to fight people; they want to do business with them." Susie Thatcher lies sick at home. Ellen and Ed return from a play. Ellie, as they call her, proceeds to jump up and down crying out that she wants to be a boy. Susie is bitter, once again in a foul mood, and Ed tries to console her as usual. Bud is on the lookout for work. He traverses the streets of the city, asking around where the best place to find a job is. He happens upon the wreckage of a car accident. There he starts up a conversation with a fellow spectator, who advises him to go to City Hall. Emile has followed through with his fancies of seeking work in America. We find him waiting at a restaurant, while an older waiter, also a foreigner, gives him directions: "Beacoup de soing and dont you forget it." He is serving a group of tipsy friends waiting for the arrival of Fifi Waters, the woman whose birthday they are celebrating. Emile spots

a redhaired girl coming from the cloakroom. He smiles and tries to "catch her eye," but she sniffs and tosses her nose in the air. "Wont look at me because I'm a waiter," he muses to himself. "When I make some money I'll show 'em." Fifi finally appears; her now quite-drunk comrades greet her heartily. She accidentally kicks one of them - a man named Holyoke - in the eye, through removing his hat with her foot. He curses her and she promptly breaks into tears. The Colonel, another man, comforts her. Emile gets off work in the early morning and meets up with Congo. They converse about immigrant life with a new friend of Emile's, Marco. The following comment is made: "It's all the same, in France you are paid badly and live well, here you are paid well and love badly." Marco expounds on the fate of socialism and anarchism in the modern world. "All over the world we are preparing," he says. "Your Commune in France was the beginning...socialism failed. It's for the anarchists to strike the next blow." Congo and Emile retire to their boarding house. Congo has mentioned that he may ship off again after all. Emile lies in bed and thinks of Marco's statement: "I never see the dawn [...] that I don't say to myself perhaps...perhaps today." The Olafsons, a newly married couple from the Bronx, visit an apartment on Riverside Drive. William Olafson, assistant manager at Keating and Bradley Sanitary Engineers notes to his wife how much the place costs; she insists he take it, arguing that they "must live up to [their] income." She lies to the real estate agent and tells him they are currently staying at the Astor. When William asks her afterwards why she lied, she explains: "He'd have thought we were Jews and wouldn't have rented us the apartment." Bud washes dishes at an eatery and complains: "Hell this aint no job for a white man." "I dont care so long as I eat," replies the Jewish boy he works with. Ellies's mother leaves her alone at home, despite the girls' protestations, in order to go to "Mrs. Spingarn's to play euchre." Gus McNeil, a milkman, does his rounds, grabs a beer to relax, but worries that his wife Nellie might smell the alcohol on him when he returns home. In the midst of contemplating a future on a farm in North Dakota, far from the noise and grime of New York, Gus is hit by a freight train backing down the tracks.

III. "DOLLARS"
George Baldwin, a young attorney, "a lawyer without any practice", leaves his office to get lunch. He reads an article in the newspaper about a milkman being severely injured early that morning by "a freight train backing down the New York Central tracks." It's Gus McNeil. Baldwin figures a lawsuit against the railroad would make a good case. He impulsively goes to McNeil's place. Gus is not in, but his wife Nellie is - a young girl with "wavy redbrown hair that [lies] in little flat curls round her high narrow forehead." Baldwin introduces himself, explains the case to her and what he wants to accomplish. He finds himself falling in love with her. "The most beautiful girl I've ever seen in my life," he thinks to himself. Ellen plays with a friend of hers named Alice. She insists on being called Elaine, "the lily maid of Astalot." Already she seems to fancy herself a princess of sorts, and New York her kingdom. Baldwin brings Nellie flowers; she assumes they are for her husband, who is still in the hospital. Though she protests at first, Nellie soon gives in to Baldwin's advances, and the two make love, the McNeil baby sleeping nearby. Emile visits a small store on Eighth Avenue, a Confiserie/Delicatessen run by a French woman named Madame Rigaud. She scolds him for not visiting her more often. He confides to her that he is tired of waiting tables. They go to the back of the shop so that Madame Rigaud can sing Emile a song; when customers come, Emile takes care of them.

Ellen is seated beside her father on a bench in the Battery. Ed talks to her about the boats that come to and leave New York. His words prompt a difficult question from his daughter: "Daddy why arent we rich?" "There are lots of people poorer than us Ellie," Ed responds. Bud helps a "grayhaired woman" carry a pile of coal up to her apartment. He mentions he is originally from Cooperstown, in upstate New York, and "was born an raised on a farm." The woman tells him she will give him a dollar for his trouble, then serves him some lunch. After he has finished the meal, Bud receives a quarter. When he asks the woman for the dollar she had promised, she berates him for not being grateful for his meal, and sends him out of her home. Jimmy Kerf is on the deck of a boat with his mother, as they drift into New York Harbor. She appears to be a wealthy woman. Her appearance is described through the young Jimmy's eyes: "She has her blue serge on and a long trailing brown veil and the little brown animal with red eyes and teeth that are real teeth round her neck." It is the Fourth of July. When Jimmy spots the Statue of Liberty he asks: "What's that in her hand?" Soon after arrival, Jimmy and his mother head off with his Aunt Emily and Uncle Jeff in a cab. Gus and Nellie meet with Baldwin. Gus is enthusiastic about the case, and continually praises the lawyer, apparently not suspecting the affair between him and his wife. After the meeting, Baldwin, feeling the pressure and stress induced by the suit and the accompanying liaison, goes out to lunch with a friend, Phil Sandbourne, a struggling architect. Sandbourne runs a firm with a colleague named Specker; he describes to Baldwin their plans involving "allsteel building." Specker has "got an idea the skyscraper of the future'll be built of steel and glass," Phil tells Baldwin.

Analysis
Manhattan Transfer is a novel without a "plot" per se, more an excavation of a city and an era than a linear narrative. It might best be described as a kaleidoscopic portrait, in which certain colors or images figure more prominently than others. That is to say that Dos Passos does return again and again to a handful of characters throughout the novel. Three of these are introduced in this opening chapter: Bud Korpenning, Ed Thatcher, and the newborn Ellen, who will emerge, with the not-yet introduced Jimmy Kerp, as the closest thing to a protagonist Manhattan Transfer can offer. Already a cross-section of time, place, and spirit, of generation and class, is evident in the introduction of the three characters. Bud is young, hopeful, the face of the working everyman, determined to make his mark on the vast metropolis. Dos Passos' chapter title seems to allocate a certain amount of importance to Bud: "Ferryslip" refers, clearly enough, to Bud's entrance on the novel's stage. The chapter that follows is titled "Metropolis," Bud's destination and his new home. Ed Thatcher, on the other hand, is already a resident of the city, a lower middle-class bureaucrat of sorts, "a little man with two blond wisps of mustache and washedout gray eyes." Where Bud seems focused and vigorous, Thatcher appears nervous and cowering, unable to control his wife's bursts of frenzy, armed with only a bouquet of flowers to face the moment. And what moment is that? The birth of the couple's first child. What should be a joyous event is here depicted in the grimmest of tones, and Dos Passos' luridly revealing prose paints a disquieting picture: "Rows of beds under bilious gaslight, a sick smell of restlessly stirring bedclothes, faces fat, lean, yellow, white; that's her. Susie's yellow hair lay in a loose coil round her little white face that looked shriveled and twisted." The only mention of the name of the third and most important character comes in the form of a harried question: "Do you still want to call her Ellen?" The baby is never offered a description. We hear of its appearance through the parents' dialogue: "Oh isn't she wonderful!" Ed proclaims, desperately attempting to inject some mirth into the situation. Strangely enough, the novel's "heroine" is introduced as just another faceless speck, an

inauspicious addition to the teeming city. Perhaps Susan is correct; perhaps the child does not in fact belong to her. When Ed innocently asks the nurse how she can tell the various newborn babies apart, the latter simply replies: "Sometimes we can't." The only hint of the baby's importance to the larger narrative comes in the opening paragraph of the book, in which Dos Passos describes a nurse carrying a baby - perhaps Ellen - in a basket. That he begins his novel with this passage suggests, in retrospect at least, that he wishes to subtly establish Ellen as a major player. And yet, the one direct description of the baby undercuts any lumiscent humanism that may arise from such a distinction: "The newborn baby squirmed in the cottonwool feebly like a knot of earthworms." As if to underline the point - that, simply put, no single character is more important than the city itself, and its collective population - Dos Passos concludes "Ferryslip" with a mininarrative about a nameless man who decides to buy a razor. It is one of numerous such instances in the book, seemingly uninflected glimpses of strangers in the metropolis. The second chapter of Dos Passos's novel expands and develops the technique introduced in "Ferryslip": namely that of the vignette-based portrait. And yet, already we are offered hints of the larger narrative to emerge from this collection of glimpses. Dos Passos does burrow into the consciousness of Ellie, as she lies awake in bed, pleading for her father to return. Here the writing attains interiority in the tradition of nineteenth century psychological literature, and paints a highly subjective portrait of the dark, menacing city: "Black spiraling roar outside was melting through the walls making the cuddled shadows throb." The difference in approach suggests Ellie's importance to the novel as a whole, just as the inclusion of Emile's thoughts to himself - "Wont look at me because I'm a waiter" - sets him up as a potentially major player. The vignettes in "Dollars" remain brief and focused, but larger patterns are beginning to emerge. For one, with the exception of Ellen's interaction with Alice, all the major episodes in "Dollars" involve a male and a female. Dos Passos offers a variety of permutations of the man/woman dynamic, ranging from the filial to the romantic to the antagonistic: Baldwin and Nellie, Emile and Madame Rigaud, Bud and the gray-haired woman, Ellie and her father, Jimmy and his mother. The mirroring of these last two suggests that Ellie and Jimmy will emerge, as they do, as the novel's two primary protagonists, each profoundly marked by the relationship with his or her parent. While Ellie's drifting from man to man later in the novel suggests she is seeking a father figure to replace the emasculated Ed Thatcher, Jimmy Kerf's desperate romanticism may likewise stem from the tragedy of his mother's death.

First Section, Chs. IV-V

Summary
IV. "TRACKS"
Jimmy and his mother, Lily, are eating dinner in their hotel on Broadway. She complains about a headache, and mentions how tired she is "of never really feeling well." Jimmy, a doting mother's boy, expresses worry: "Muddy," he says, "mother why arent you eating your soup?" After dinner, Lily lets her son go outside to buy candy at the nearby drugstore. When he returns he finds her lying in bed, "her face [...] purplish pale." She tells him she merely has "a terrible headache" and that he should call up Aunt Emily. He does so, and soon Emily arrives and sends him off to bed. Jimmy can't sleep, and returns to his mother's room later in the night, finding a doctor and nurse with her. Emile mentions to Madame Rigaud that she must need help running the store. "Emile, you're a goodlooking fellow and steady and you'll get on in the world," she tells him. "But I'll never put myself in a man's power again... I've suffered too much..."

Baldwin has won the McNeil suit and has received several more good cases as a result. He is doing well. But a visit by Nellie casts a shadow over his day. When he suggests to her that she divorce Gus and live with him, she treats the idea as if it were a joke. "Anyways I aint comin here again," she says. When Baldwin tells her that they should not part bitterly, that they have loved one another, she nearly breaks into tears. Bud gets a drink with a Japanese man who calls himself Laplander Matty. After encountering racism at the bar, Matty takes Bud with him to Pearl Street to pick up prostitutes. Phineas P. Blackhead, an attorney for the railroads, meets with labor delegates who are planning a strike. "I have confidence," he tells them in typical legal-speak, "I can say I have the completest confidence, that we can settle this matter amicably and agreeably." Jimmy, his mother hit by a stroke, fears his return to school. He imagines a schoolyard fight with other kids. "Mother's had a stroke and next week I'll go back to school," he thinks. His Aunt Emily takes him to dinner at her lavish apartment, where he meets his cousins Maisie and James Merivale. At the table, Uncle Jeff expounds on the fate of the city: "New York is no longer what it used to be when Emily and I first moved up here about the time the Ark landed... City's overrun with kikes and low Irish, that's what's the matter with it... In ten years a Christian wont be able to make a living... I tell you the Catholics and the Jews are going to run us out of our own country, that's what they are going to do." Jimmy's mind races back to images of school - and of a kid named Harris who was picked on because "he was supposed to be a Jew." A man arrives, uninvited, much to the consternation of Jeff and Emily. He is Joe Harland, a retired broker, now an impoverished drunkard who refers to himself as "the family skeleton." "They dont like me," he explains, "they wish I'd go away." After he leaves, Emily mentions that years ago the "papers called him the King of the Curb" because of his monumental success in the stocks. After dinner the children begin to "play stock exchange." "What do we do?" Jimmy asks. "Oh juss run round an yell mostly," Maisie responds. After Jimmy calls her a fool during the game, Maisie throws a fit, tells him he is "in danger of hellfire," and refuses to play anymore. Jimmy grabs his hat, runs out the door, and races back to his home. Congo is back from sea, catching up with his old friend Emile. They talk about Madame Rigaud, and Congo suggests that if Emile really wants Rigaud to fall for him and let him run the store he should "make her jealous." Susie is gone. Ed Thatcher, now living alone with his daughter, sits in his office, listening to a man named Viler try to sell him a suspicious stock. When Viler asks Ed why he seems satisfied with his "damned office," the commute, his financial worries, Thatcher responds: "I believe in workin my way up, that's all." Once alone in the office, Ed thinks of his daughter and muses about what might happen if he bought the stock, if he took the plunge... "Take a plunge and come up with your hands full, pockets full, bankaccount full, vaults full of money. If I only dared take the risk."

V. "STEAMROLLER"
Years have passed. Jimmy Herf is now a young man of sixteen, wearing a necktie and climbing a hill close to the harbor. "And muddy had had a stroke and now she was buried. He couldn't think how she used to look; she was dead that was all." Emile talks with a girl, who threatens to tell Madame Rigaud of their prior scheme: standing in front of the delicatessen window together hugging and kissing, just so Rigaud would see, get jealous, and fall for Emile. The Frenchman comforts her, walks off, spots a fire. "They caught the firebug," he hears someone say. It is a black man, dragged away from the scene by two policemen who ruthlessly beat him with clubs. When he returns to the delicatessen, Emile asks Madame Rigaud when they are getting married.

Ellen, like Jimmy, has grown. We find her seated in a train headed to Atlantic City, next to a boy named John. He calls her "prince's daughter" and is obviously smitten with her. They spend the night together in Atlantic City, but she is sick, uneasy, troubled. "If she touched [John] she would die." She vomits in the bathroom. She lies awake, listening to the rain pound the pavement outside. Jimmy eats lunch with his Uncle Jeff at one of the fanciest clubs in New York. Jeff, now Jimmy's guardian, explains to him the importance of his future, of a proper career, and remarks: "I have not noticed that you felt sufficient responsibility about moneymatters..." He advises that Jimmy follow James Merivale's example and work his way up the family firm. Jimmy nods in agreement to all of Jeff's suggestions and dictates, but once outside his angry thoughts come to the fore: "Uncle Jeff and his office can go plumb to hell." Bud sleeps on a cot surrounded by other men. The place appears to be a homeless shelter of some sort. Bud is restless, unable to sleep. He shows a companion his back, displaying the scars his father gave him when he was a child, and tells the story of how he killed the old man and set off to the big city to never be found. The bum is worried for Bud, tells him he will go crazy if he keeps going in this manner. Bud leaves, walks along Brooklyn Bridge. "Goddamn detectives," he thinks. "Dont matter where I go; cant go nowhere now." He jumps off the bridge. A Captain McAvoy "of the tugboat Prudence" witnesses the incident. Bud's body is fished out of the water. "A pretty thing to happen on a man's wedding day," the Captain mutters.

Analysis
"Steamroller" begins and ends on the water. It opens with the following line: "A steamroller was clattering back and forth over the freshly tarred metaling of the road at the cemetery gate." It closes with Captain McAvoy staring at the dead body of Bud - a character who hitherto had become such a recurrent presence that one might have suspected he would emerge as the novel's chief protagonist. Water is thus equated with not just death but, specifically, the space of death and of burial, that is to say, a final resting place. Bud's death echoes the cemetery mentioned in the first sentence, and the passing of two important characters - Lily Herf and Bud - frames the chapter. The framing devices go even further. Consider that both Bud and Lily are both introduced on the decks of ships. That the death of Bud's father ultimately drives him to suicide, and that the death of Jimmy's mother is what brings him to that hillside road in Yonkers at the chapter's start. Death propels the characters, and thus the narrative, forward, while leaving behind the remnants of the past. Never again will Bud Korpenningfigure in the novel; he is simply washed away, like so many other victims of the metropolis. If one can identify a single "killer" at work here, it must be unchecked capitalism (which is subject to a scathing parody in Maisie and Jimmy's playing "stock exchange"). In this sense, three moments stand out as the key points of this section of Manhattan Transfer: Ed Thatcher and Viler at the end of "Tracks"; Joe Harland visiting his relatives, much to their dismay; and Bud's suicide. In a sense, each of these scenes posits a casualty of capitalism, and together the three-point sequence may be interpreted as a progression from one kind of damage to the other: from the mid-life crisis in Thatcher, to the wrecked old age of Joe, to, in the example of Bud, the most tragic of all - the death of a young man. Dos Passos's language suggests that money itself is the root of the tragedy that unites these lost souls. "Dollars swarming up like steam," he writes, "twisting scattering against the stars." It is a hopeful vision for Thatcher, and yet strangely reminiscent of a biblical plague. It is the light at the end of the tunnel - and yet that light is an apocalyptic one, spelling the end as well as a new beginning. The very titles of the chapters - "Dollars," "Tracks," "Steamroller" - seem pulled from a Blaise Cendrars poem, underlining the

equation of money and movement, of wealth and speed, as well as a particularly modernist conception of the twentieth-century city, be it Paris (in the case of Cendrars) or New York (in the case of Dos Passos). For both these writers, Baudelaire remains the most pivotal influence, for his darkly romantic vision of the late-nineteenth century metropolis decomposes a collective whole into subjective fragments, pre-cinematic snapshots redolent with excessive imagery and overloaded with metaphor. It is, in other words, a tradition of excess, of descriptions which actively stretch and attempt to encompass the entirety of a lived experience. The subjective meets the objective, the individual meets the collective, and Baudelaire's "flaneur" meets Cendrars' trains and Dos Passos's swarming dollar bills. In a word: modernity. Dos Passos's leftist leanings at the time he wrote Manhattan Transfer cannot be ignored. Ed Thatcher is an inherently weak man, weakened by his need to follow the rules of an economy which itself knows no rules; his hidebound composure is ill at ease in the brave new world of heedless expansionism and hedonistic spending. The towers of Wall Street are too tall for this little man. And yet even the "King of the Curb," the once-great Joe Harland, is likewise humbled by New York's rampant capitalism, reduced to drunkenness and a status as the "family skeleton." In a way, Harland will emerge as not just his family's spectre, but that of the entire city - New York's "skeleton" one might argue, the victim of American capitalism who refuses to go away. Whereas Ed Thatcher fantasizes about prestige - thinking of himself as "Millionaire Thatcher" - and Joe temporarily attains it, Bud is doomed to suffer one humiliating encounter after another, from a failed attempt to get a job, to the resentful gray-haired woman who will give him a meal but not a dollar for his trouble, to a homeless shelter and finally the depths of the Hudson. In that entire course, the only moment of happiness he seems to experience is in the company of a fellow victim - a Japanese immigrant, Laplander Matty. Racism rears its ugly head when a man at a bar calls Matty a "little Yap," and again when a "negro" is immediately labeled a "firebug" and beaten mercilessly by a pair of policemen. Indeed, the more disturbing aspects of the city and of the era begin to take the foreground in these chapters. Dos Passos ceases to be a mere stylist; his style has become politicized. An agenda is now evident in his writing - but it is a testament to his virtuoso skill that it so organically and effortlessly emerges.

Second Section, Chs. I-III

Summary
I. "GREAT LADY ON A WHITE HORSE"
More time has passed. Jimmy Herf, now on his own and a budding journalist, goes to see an older woman with whom he has a relationship in her apartment building. She is an aspiring but out-of-work actress named Ruth Prynne. Jimmy has grown into a fast talker, a witty skeptic, and he fires off the following line to Ruth: "The sun's shining outside and people are coming out of church and going home to overeat and read at their Sunday papers among the rubberplants." Cassandra Wilkins, a neighbor whom Jimmy refers to as "funny-looking," is folding sheets off a cot in the hall. "Ruth does nothing but talk about you," she eagerly tells Jimmy. At that moment, a "crookednosed man" with red hair opens his door: it is Mr. Oglethorpe. His wife Elaine calls from inside her room for those outside to quiet down. Jimmy also catches a glimpse of Mrs. Sunderland, the oldest lady of the lot, going into the bathroom. He hurries Ruth out of the building, complaining to her that "that place gives [him] the infernal jimjams" and noting that Elaine - "that lovely girl with copper hair," as he describes her, and our very own Ellen Thatcher - is too beautiful to be married to the likes of "the Ogle." Ruth notes that Elaine has "made kind of a hit in Peach Blossoms" and that she has talent as an actress.

Ellen walks through the city. She watches a girl with "chestnut hair" in a green Dolly Varten hat ride slowly by on a white horse, over a saddlecloth embroidered with the word: "Danderine." She finally arrives at the Brevoort, there to lunch with George Baldwin. She explains to him that for once she has had the whole day free, and that she has spent it walking through the Park from 105th Street to 59th. George makes a sneering remark about Ellen's husband - whom she refers to as Jojo - and she snaps back at him. "For better or worse he is my husband, till divorce do us part," she says. It is very quickly evident that George and Ellen are having an affair. Stanwood Emery, a rebellious college boy - "all he does is drink and raise Cain," Baldwin notes of him - and the son of the senior partner in Baldwin's firm, arrives at the table. George introduces him to Ellen, and Stand mentions that he saw her perform onstage the night before. Soon afterwards, John Oglethorpe himself - the same John, we might assume, who accompanied Ellen to Atlantic City years ago - appears. When Ellen departs, leaving Baldwin frustrated, his offer to take her to the theater rejected, she runs into Stan outside of the restaurant. He has waited around to see her come out, and implores her to allow him to escort her someplace in his Ford. She readily agrees, noting that "it's nice to meet somebody humanly young." In the car, the two new acquaintances pass by the girl on the white horse.

II. "LONGLEGGED JACK OF THE ISTHMUS"

Joe Harland types away at an office, nervous he is about to be fired. Then he wanders about the Battery, thinking: "A fine mess you've made of your life Joseph Harland. Fortyfive and no friends and not a cent to bless yourself with." He heads to a bar and regales fellow customers with his sorry life story. The "Wizard of Wall Street" he was once called. For ten years he traded on margins, covered on stocks he knew little of, and always made money; according to him, the secret of his luck was "a blue silk crocheted necktie" his mother had given him. Whenever he wore it, he did well in the stocks; whenever he didn't, his luck failed him. As it so happened, he fell in love with a girl, gave her the necktie to prove his devotion, only to have her sniff at it as old and worn out and throw it to the fire. A messenger boy breaks into an apartment, only to be caught by a gun-toting Ellen, Stan standing behind her. Laughing at the young burglar in a Western Union outfit - "it's only hunger made me take to it," he explains - Stan and Ellen give him a dollarbill and send him on his way. We follow the boy home... Stan and Ellen go out to grab a drink. They are deeply in love - but Ellen stands by her husband nonetheless. "He's just a peculiar very unhappy person," she says. When she returns home, soaring on feelings of romance and of her rising star on Broadway, she suddenly feels "sick disgust" as she pushes the key into the lock and opens the door to her husband's apartment. Ruth Prynne tells Jimmy Herf a wild story. Apparently, a few nights ago at Mrs. Sunderland's apartment building - or "the Balkans" as Jimmy calls the place - John Oglethorpe was having a furious row with his wife, brandishing a revolver in her direction and yelling, "Disarm me or I shall kill this woman." Tony Hunter, another actor and a known homosexual who was present at the occasion, managed to grab the gun. Ellen went back to her bedroom as if she had just given a performance. John banged on her door, but got no answer. Finally he went to Tony's room and asked the young man: "Can a broken man crave asylum in your room for the night[?]" The two spent the night together. Meanwhile, Miss Costello, the landlady, insisted that the Oglethorpes leave the building at dawn. Joe Harland is talking to himself. He has asked the Merivales - Jimmy's Aunt Emily and Uncle Jeff - for money, but has been refused. "Emily'd have given it to me if it hadn't been for that damned old tightwad," he figures. "Lord knows they used to eat out of my hand in the old days." His landlady Mrs. Budkowitz demands he pay the rent, which is

now three weeks late. Joe steps outside, goes to a nearby store and asks his friend Felsius, the storeman, for a loan. Again, he is refused. Cassandra Wilkins and Morris McAvoy, her beau, exit a movie theater. He treats her disdainfully, lamenting his poverty: "Goddam it's hell to be broke," he says. Cassie insists he will get a good job, but he finds it hard to agree: "I'm not so young as I was Cassie. I aint got any time to lose." For her part, Cassie wants to dance - but not for the money. "Once you got money you can do what you like," Morris argues. "I want money." Cassie tells Ellen she has broken it off with Morris, who was furious because she wouldn't live with him. She seems to believe with all her heart in pure love, untainted and eternally innocent. Ellen, meanwhile, is making a getaway from Oglethorpe. She packs up her things, has a cab wait for her outside, and orders Cassie not to tell "Jojo" where she is.

III. "NINE DAYS' WONDER"

Phil Sandbourne argues with colleagues about Stanford White's murder. "A man's morals arent anybody's business. It's his work that counts." So begins the chapter. Moments after he utters these words, Phil, who is walking east along 34th and crossing Fifth Avenue, spots a girl in a taxicab: "From under the black brim of a little hat with a red cockade in it two gray eyes flash green black into his." Phil is mesmerized and doesn't see a vehicle run into his direction. He survives the crash and is whisked away in an ambulance. Stan, back from Harvard, pays a visit to his friend Jimmy Herf. He asks him if he has any liquor to spare. Later that morning he mentions that he has been "fired from college." We learn that Jimmy graduated from Columbia - not Princeton or Yale, as Uncle Jeff would have preferred. Stan asks Jimmy how Ruth is doing. "She's all right," is the reply. "She hasnt got a job yet." "Why the hell does everyone want to succeed?" Stan demands. "I'd like to meet somebody who wanted to fail. That's the only sublime thing." Jimmy responds that it's "all right if you have a comfortable income." The two friends drink absinthe together, and Jimmy speaks of moving out to Mexico, getting away from it all. Stan takes him to another caf to meet Ellen - only to find her seated next to her husband. Ellen seems to think nothing of it, and only says to John: "Isnt that wonderful Jojo?" Jimmy, for his part, is immediately smitten by the sight of Ellen, with her "coppery hair" and "bright blue dress." Oglethorpe leaves and Ellen requests that Jimmy keep her company for a while. Stammering, blushing, the young man acquiesces. Harry Goldweiser, an older friend of Ellen's and something of a professional consultant to her, speaks with her about her career. He asks her how she likes "being a nine days' wonder." She doesn't know how to respond. Baldwin eats breakfast with his estranged wife Cecily, who demands that their marriage end. The headlines in the paper stare out at George: "ASSASSINATION OF ARCHUDUKE WILL HAVE GRAVE CONSEQUENCES. AUSTRIAN ARMY MOBILIZED." World War I has just begun. Baldwin implores his wife to be reasonable, insists that "Mrs. Oglethorpe" is merely a friend, and that his days of infidelity are long gone. Finally, he concedes that a divorce would be harmful to his professional situation, but that if she insists on no longer living with him he will see what he can arrange. Ellen is dressing up her new room, beginning her life away from her husband. "The first place of my own I ever had in my life," she calls the apartment, and what is more Oglethorpe will let her divorce him if she so wishes. Cassandra pays her a visit, and tells her she thinks she is pregnant. "I wanted our love to be always pure and beautiful," she says, "but he said he'd never see me again if I didn't..." Ellen tries her best to console her. Cassie refuses to marry, and Ellen advises that she go to a doctor.

Joe Harland notices a newspaper headline: "CONTRACTORS PLAN LOCKOUT TO ANSWER BUILDERS' STRIKE." He is now working as night watchman, and when a young man approaches him about joining the "solid front against this here lockout sitooation," Joe refuses. "This is the first decent job I've had in five years," he explains. Jimmy reads Jean Christophe and complains to Stan that they live in a country where "nobody ever does anything." Later that night, when Jimmy is lying alone in bed, Ellen slips into his room, pleading that she cannot see her husband "when he's in that condition." Jimmy takes a look and sees that, from outside the window of Stan's room, John Oglethorpe is yelling and calling Ellen a "slut." "My blood will be on your head Elaine forever," he rails. Ellen visits her father, who has been reading of Stanwood Emery's hedonistic exploits with "a certain charming young actress whose career is fast approaching stellar magnitude" in the paper. Ed asks Ellen to take a vacation with him, but she says she must look for a job, now that the show is going on the road. She explains that she is divorcing John Oglethorpe, and that George Baldwin - "a friend of mine," she calls him "is going to run it through."

Analysis
One of the key moments of this section, and indeed the whole novel, is Phil Sandbourne's catching the gaze of the girl in the cab. Never do we know her name. The only description we ever read of her treats her as if she were herself a collection of fragments: "From under the black brim of a little hat with a red cockade in it two gray eyes flash green black into his." Consider the progression of colors: black to red to gray to green to black again. When the crash comes, Phil sees Fifth Avenue spinning "in red blue purple spirals," while "blue pillars of policemen" rush to the scene. An event is reduced to moments, which are in turn reduced to fragments, which are in turn reduced to colors: all is abstracted in Dos Passos's rendering of the scene. A whole life transpires between Phil's fleeting glance into the girl's eyes, and yet the language itself offers us only a set of colors: black, red, gray, green, purple, and blue. The girl in the cab, for her part, recalls the nameless girl on the horse two chapters earlier; she too was described by her color scheme - green and white. While the horse-mounted apparition fed into Ellen's fantasies of aristocracy, of New York her enchanted kingdom and eternal playground, the girl in the cab feels baser, closer to the muck and grime of the earth, by virtue of her mode of transport and the wreckage it inadvertently helps cause. Just as Stanford White, who Phil extols in the opening of "Nine Days' Wonder," a mere page before his fateful encounter, was murdered because of a chorus girl (dating this scene of the novel to 1906), so does Phil's near death come about because of the opposite sex. The danger of attraction in the modern urban environment is underlined in this connection; no sooner has Phil praised White's architecture than he falls silent at the sight of the passing girl whose name he will never know. History gives way to the moment; one has the sense that seeing that girl may prove to be the most meaningful thing to ever happen to Mr. Sandbourne. One is also reminded of the famous speech in Citizen Kane, in which Kane's former colleague, now an old man, tells the reporter of a girl in a white dress he saw on a boat years ago. The encounter lasted a second; he never learned her name; he never saw her again. And yet, year after year, his memory drifts back once or twice a month to the vision of the girl. Embedded within the baroque grandiosity of Kane, that simple account rings with particular clarity; in a film so devoted to a larger-than-life figure, to both American and film history, to the very idea of America, the story of the girl on the boat lingers in the mind like a haunting melody. Like Welles, Dos Passos is an artist of excess; it is within the grand, teetering structure of his opus that he plants the chance "meeting" of a marginal character and a nameless one. That chance meeting seems, in turn, to inform the work as a whole with meaning. It is a testament to the sadness and risks of the city, but more important its precipitous joys. Where else but in the bustling

metropolis would a wordless encounter like this be possible? People are sped along at the speed of bullets, but for a fleeing second they lock eyes, and that second lasts an eternity. If Manhattan Transfer is prose, Phil Sandbourne's suspended moment of romantic yearning, of genuine human connection, is crystallized into poetry. "Her lips are pouting towards him, her eyes flutter gray caught birds." It is also worth mentioning, of course, that the 1906 marking of this scene is something of a surprise - and an indication of Dos Passos's larger tactic. Just a few pages later, when we find George Baldwin at breakfast with his wife, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand has been assassinated and World War I is about to begin. The year is therefore 1914. Not content to merely jump back and forth in space, stitching homes and neighborhoods of the city together like a patchwork quilt, Dos Passos mixes time, playing with it as if it were clay in his hands. A microcosm of this practice can be found in the aforementioned "jump cut," where a significant period of time is condensed into a single sentence, or phrase, or comma. Here, the technique plays out on a larger stage - whole years dissolving in the space of a paragraph break. The result is that we never know exactly when we are. We must become attuned to the news clippings and advertisement slogans and popular ditties and fashion trends Dos Passos enumerates in his exhaustive and whirlwind descriptions; those fragments of society and of the city provide, just like the headline Baldwin reads, the narrative's only bearings. At the same time, one should note that the number of one-paragraph vignettes has decreased by this point in the novel. The kaleidoscopic vision of earlier pages has by and large given way to a more grounded and, yes, conventional structure. Ellen and Jimmy appear and reappear - and then finally meet. It is clear from the description of their first encounter that Jimmy has feelings for the woman; and one would not be wrong to guess that those two characters have not seen the last of each other...

Second Section, Chs. IV-VI

Summary
IV. "FIRE ENGINE"
Ellen is walking through Central Park with Harry Goldweiser, who confesses her love to her: "You cant understand how lonely a man gets when year after year he's had to crush his feelings down into himself." Ellen is fairly unresponsive. The two decide to go to Coney Island together. Gus McNeil, now a wealthy man "with a heavy watchchain in his vest," sits in Baldwin's office. The lawyer advises Gus stay clear of the impending Contractors and Builders Association lockout and the union strike. Gus has apparently been dabbling in politics, and has encountered some difficulties with a certain Judge Connor, a Republican from Albany. Baldwin tells Gus that it is imperative to keep the papers out, to avoid publicity: "[Otherwise] you'll have all the reformers on your heels." When Gus asks Baldwin to actively intercede on his behalf, George responds: "I'm a lawyer and not a politician." Joe O'Keefe, a young man in a straw hat and likewise involved in the strike, leaves Baldwin's office and meets up with Joe Harland outside. "Here I've got myself all in deep in this political game and there dont seem to be no future to it," he tells Harland. "God I wish I was educated like you." Stan accompanies Ellen to her dressing room. He is drunk as usual. Ellen and her assistant Missy put him in the bathtub and the actress runs to the stage to make her entrance. It is a new dramatic role, a big step forward for Ellen's career. Harry Goldweiser explains to her after the show that they "have just got [her] started as an emotional actress." Ellen complains that she hates it, that "it's all false," and that in "a musical show you could be sincere." The situation with Stan nearly comes to a head

when Mr. Fallik, a friend of Harry's, asks Ellen if he can use her bathroom - where Stan is still lying in the tub. Milly quickly makes up an excuse about the bathroom being "out of order." Once Goldweiser and Fallik have left, Ellen and Milly dry Stan off and slip him into a dress (since his own clothes are soaked). They speedily hurry him through the back exit, and Ellen takes a cab with him. "Stan you've got to stop drinking," she tells him. "It's getting beyond a joke."

V. "WENT TO THE ANIMALS' FAIR"

George Baldwin escorts Ellen to a crowded roadhouse. There they meet the McNeils. Ellen has heard of Gus, has seen his name in the papers associated with the "builders' strike and the Interborough bond issue." World War I has just broken out. A recent fatherdaughter murder (judged a rape-suicide by the police) has marked the neighborhood. But all Gus can think of is Ellen and his love for her. Seeing Nellie again makes him uneasy, reminds him of their affair. "Think of it I was crazy in love with her and now I cant remember what her first name was," he tells Ellen. He is almost forty years old now and a great success as a lawyer. Yet he is deeply unhappy. He and his wife Cecily have separated, for the time being at least. He pleads to Ellen to let him take care of her. "By gad you are so full of love and mystery and glitter," he says. When he asks her how she feels, she only replies: "George please dont ask me." Just a few tables over, Jimmy Herf sits with Tony Hunter and others. They discuss the local murder; Grant Bullock, a sailor, insists that the rape-suicide theory is nonsense and that "the Black Hand" is responsible for the crime. "Canarsie's full of the Black Hand, full of anarchists and kidnappers and undesirable citizens," he argues. "It's our business to ferret em out and vindicate the honor of this poor old man and his beloved daughter." The conversation shifts to the war - "I bet the Germans are in Paris in two weeks," one man says - and Bullock takes Jimmy over to talk to "Congo Jake," the roadhouse's French barkeep. It is the same Congo we know from earlier. On the way, Jimmy spots Ellen. "I dont want to be had by anybody," Ellen tells Baldwin. Meanwhile, Congo and Jimmy converse. Congo explains how he got his name - because of his dark, curly hair - and tells of his voyages as a youth. He says he won't go fight in the war: "A workingman has no country," he argues. He goes on to explain that the war is being fought simply to keep the working class all over the world from starting a revolution. Ellen joins the two men, asks Jimmy to help her get away from Baldwin. Jimmy notes he would like to be a war correspondent, and Ellen replies that she might join the Red Cross as a nurse. When the subject of Stan comes up, Jimmy tells Ellen he wishes she would keep him from drinking so much. "I'm not his keeper," she responds. Jimmy and Ellen dance, and soon enough Baldwin interrupts them. He grabs Ellen's wrist and snaps at her: "You've been playing with me long enough, do you hear me? Some day some man's going to take a gun and shoot you. You think you can play me like all the other little sniveling fools... You're no better than a common prostitute." He pulls a gun, but Gus McNeil is there to grab it from his hand. The situation is quickly diffused. "No harm done, just a little nervous attack, see?" Gus tells the gathering crowd. Jimmy hails Ellen a taxi, and before taking it the two of them take a short walk to the "murder cottage" - where the old man and his daughter were found dead. Ellen asks Jimmy if he has seen Stan. He has not. They return to the cab and Ellen asks to be alone. Jimmy leaves the roadhouse, accompanied by Tony Hunter, who has troubles of his own. "I thought you were like me," Tony tells Jimmy. He confesses his homosexuality. "I'm so ashamed," he cries. "I'm so afraid people will find out about it." He finally says he would like to kill himself. Jimmy halfheartedly tries to comfort him. "They're lots of people in the same boat," he notes.

VI. "FIVE STATUTORY QUESTIONS"

Joe O'Keefe takes Joe Harland to his home. He too was at the roadhouse the night before - he was there "to take a message to the chief about somebody tippin him off that they were going to close the market" - and he excitedly tells Harland about Baldwin's uproar. The two men discuss the war: "I dont see how this can last long," Harland says. O'Keefe then introduces him to his kid brother Mike. Moments later, "a small grayhaired woman" appears. She turns on Harland and tells him to leave: "I dont allow no drunken bums in my house." Harland does as told, muttering to himself as he leaves: "Charwoman." Ellen finally sees Stan Emery again, in a nightclub where she is seated with Harry Goldweiser. He has returned from "the most exordinately spectacular trip" up to Montreal and "back through Niagara Falls." He introduces a girl named Pearline to her. "We got so tight in Niagara Falls that when we came to we found we were married," he explains. All Ellen can do is say, "Good night Stan." Jimmy happens upon Joe Harland at "the end of Manhattan," looking at photogravures in a Sunday paper while a steamer passes in front of the statue of Liberty. "You're Lily Herf's boy," Joe says, and Jimmy likewise recognizes him. The two men share a cigarette. Jimmy tells Joe of his job as a reporter for the Times, and how sick he is of it. "You'll never get anywhere with that attitude," Joe insists. "Poor dear Lily was so proud of you... She wanted you to be a great man, she was so ambitious for you." Jimmy replies with a laugh: "I didnt say I wasnt ambitious." Later he mentions that he would like to go to the war. Harland asks him for some change, and he and Jimmy go share a cup of coffee. Before they leave, Jimmy notices an image of Ellen in Harland's paper. The text reads: "Talented Young Actress Scores Hit in the Zinnia Girl."

Analysis
The midpoint of this section is also roughly the midpoint of the novel: the night at the roadhouse. Much as a dramatist like Shakespeare would in the last act of a play, Dos Passos deftly interweaves his various storylines, assembling disparate characters in a single time and setting. The narrative of Emile and Congo reappears and interacts with Jimmy and Ellen's respective arcs - quite literally, in the conversation between Congo, Jimmy, and Ellen. Baldwin meets Nellie McNeil again, reminding us of his days as a young, struggling lawyer. Joe O'Keefe makes an appearance, recalling the workers' problems that are accumulating; Gus also stands in as a token of the political machine that surrounds all the characters. Tony Hunter finally emerges as a character in his own right, illuminating yet another social problem: homophobia. Stan is missing, and yet nearly present through the repeated references to his name and person; Ellen asks Jimmy twice where he is, and twice Jimmy replies that he doesn't know. At the same time, hovering above these individual lines of action and emotion, a cataclysmic event has been introduced: World War I. When Jimmy and Ellen talk, seemingly in a joking manner at first, of joining the fight in Europe, Dos Passos establishes a premise which will later be paid off, when the two characters do indeed head off to the Continent, Jimmy fulfilling a dream of sorts and Ellen disposing with hers - essentially replacing the outfit of princess of New York, of which she has grown so tired, with that of a Red Cross nurse, close to the soil, to the carnage, to life itself rather than its fantastical reproduction on a stage. Of course, Dos Passos is drawing from his own life experiences here. He too participated in World War I, driving ambulances in France and Italy. And, just like Jimmy, he too lost his mother at a young age. It should be noted that while the roadhouse chapter might be characterized by its very multiplicity of perspectives, Jimmy and Ellen do emerge as the two prime locus points of the scene's narrative: Jimmy as Dos Passos's alter-ego, and Ellen as the love of his life. Another point worth mentioning is that "Went to the Animals' Fair" is the only chapter of the novel to respect the unity of time and place. While Ellen is seriously considering quitting the stage, Dos Passos's writing for once fits the mold of traditional dramaturgy, telling a story that is confined to a single space and its environs, and to a single night. No

extraneous vignettes feature in the chapter. The "Animals' Fair" of the title may be the roadhouse itself, or it might refer to the absurdities of World War I, looming in the distance but quickly approaching New York and America. Dos Passos uses symmetry again and again to structure his seemingly unstructured novel. "Fire Engine" and "Five Statutory Questions" are both of roughly equal length, and serve as a sort of frame to the roadhouse scene. In these two chapters, the vignettebased technique is in operation, but "Fire Engine" begins and ends with Ellen, just as "Five Statutory Questions" opens and closes with Joe Harland. If one counts the opening, italicized passage of prose-poetry that precedes "Five Statutory Questions" (a passage of similar form opens each chapter of the novel), then the chapter contains five separate sections of vignettes, just as its title might suggest. Dos Passos closes the chapter with another fateful crossing of gazes: this time between Jimmy and a photograph of Ellen. Though the photo is by definition static, Dos Passos imbues it with movement through his writing -- as if this moment were just another permutation of the wordless encounters that populate the novel and characterize the city. "A face made out of modulated brown blurs," he writes. Again, color features prominently, and again the unity of the face or body is fragmented. The fragmentation gives way to abstraction, so that in essence Jimmy is starting at "modulated brown blurs," fluctuating bits of color that do not so much define a whole as exist on their own - indefinable pieces of the city. The paper is itself in motion: it falls from Harland's hand; Jimmy picks it up; then he too drops it. But the paper becomes Ellen; when Dos Passos writes, "she fell face down," he is referring simultaneously to the actress, her image, and the material upon which that image is printed. This doubling of identities reminds the reader of the city as a whole: faces peering out of windows might as well be faces stuck in photographs, framed by the contours of the image; just as those faces are carried along through subways and trains and taxicabs and riding white horses, so too does Ellen travel through the air on Harland's paper -- her own "white horse" as one would have it. What is important to recognize is that Dos Passos is sublimating romantic desire into the gaze, and extrapolating out of that gaze a vision of city life -- constantly in motion, constantly in flux, where years can flicker by in an instant and a single suspended moment can hang in time indefinitely.

Second Section, Chs. VII-VIII

Summary
VII. "ROLLERCOASTER"
Stan gets into a drunken brawl in a bar. When he comes to he is sitting on a ferryboat. He mutters to himself, complains he has DT's, curses Pearline Anderson, his twenty-one year-old wife. He makes his way home, practically crawling along, and the next passage we find him in his apartment, sending a chair flying through a window. He is too inebriated to think straight. Finally he lies "on his back on the floor of the revolving kitchen" and laughs. "The only man who survived the flood rose a great lady on a white horse," he thinks. "Up in flames, up, up." He lets off the gasjet and begins trying to light a match. After a few tries, he finally succeeds, When Pearline returns to her street, she finds her apartment in flames. She has just finished telling Mrs. Robinson, a cashier lady in a grocery store, that although she hasn't seen Stan in two days she is not worried. Her husband, she explains, is in fact quite ambitious and "wants to be an architect." He is apparently going to have his father send the couple abroad so that he may study architecture. When she arrives at the scene of the fire, however, a policeman prevents her from entering the building. She faints before the firemen bring Stan out. "Just overcome by smoke," the policeman says.

VIII. "ONE MORE RIVER TO JORDAN"

Baldwin is riding the subway with Phil Sandbourne, who is just out of the hospital. Claustrophobia is getting the better of him: "I'll be seeing the inside of an undertaking parlor if I dont get out of this subway soon." They exit the train and walk up Lexington Avenue, while Baldwin insists that he is "in a very delicate position downtown" and that he cannot afford a scandal involving him and "The Zinnia Girl" - that is to say, Ellen. He and Cecily have finally achieved a "modus vivendi," as he puts it. The talk shifts to Phil's work and his ideas about "vitreous and superenameled tile." With the ability to "make tile of any color," he argues, the city could become multicolored rather than uniformly gray, and there would "be more love an less divorce." Ellen is practically assaulted by phone calls in her room: one suitor after another, one man after another for whom she must put on a bright face, and finally even Ruth Prynneherself. Ruth and Cassie come to pay her a visit, and we learn that Stan has died. Ellen's ears "ring sickeningly," and after just a few moments with the two ladies she hurries to the bathroom and pounds on her knees with clenched fists. "Those women'll drive me mad," she thinks. Then she regains her composure and rejoins her friends, as if nothing had happened. Ellen and Goldweiser stand together on a roof-garden at a society event, gazing over the nocturnal skyline of New York. Goldweiser laments the appetite of the city for rotten farces, the lack of true artistic sense. In a better world, he argues, Ellen would be "the greatest actress" and he "the great producer, the unseen builder." All Ellen can say is the following: "I think this city is full of people wanting inconceivable things." A moment later she turns to Goldweiser and asks: "Can you understand a woman who wants to be a harlot, a common tart, sometimes?" He is surprised. She feels she is about to cry. Jimmy and Ellen sit at a table full of young men in an Italian restaurant. A heated debate about the rights of the proletariat and the lot of the "downtrodden" is raging. Jimmy is firmly on the side of the proletariat: he compares contemporary New York and America to "the horrible slave civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia." But, he admits, he cannot "blame it all on capitalism." He and Ellen leave together and talk. She complains about her work, remembers how she used to enjoy it. "You see I was a crazy little stagestruck kid who got launched out in a lot of things I didnt understand before I had time to learn anything about life," she says. Meeting Stan, who she loved deeply, changed things: "he made me feel there were other things...unbelievable things..." Finally she confesses that she is pregnant with Stan's baby and that she is going to give up her career and raise it. Jimmy almost breaks down: "O God that's the bravest thing I ever heard of a woman doing," he says. A woman enters a doctor's office. He gives her an abortion. When all is done, she hails a cab and drives to the Ritz.

Analysis
Stanwood Emery follows the fate of Bud Korpenning, and Dos Passos presents us with a second suicide. While Bud meets his end in water, Stan finds it in fire. While Bud plummets to his death, Stan climbs the stairs to his upper-story apartment and there commits his final act. While sailors lift Bud up from the river, policemen and firemen carry Stan down from the fire. It is important to consider the emphasis on the vertical in both deaths. New York is posited as a city of highs and lows - literally, in terms of the skyscrapers, apartment buildings, and tenement houses, and figuratively, when it comes to the great social divides between rich and poor, "high" and "low" class. Stan, of course, is very much the opposite of Bud in social terms, and yet the two operate almost as mirrors of one another. Stan is introduced only ten pages after Bud's demise; it is almost as if he replaces him. Both men die by their own hands in a neardelirious state, and in both cases Dos Passos blends their inner thoughts into the fabric of

his omniscient narration, mixing the first- and third-person and thereby molding a kind of hybrid subjectivity out of his characters' desperation. Compare the following passages: "Beyond black chimneys and lines of roofs faint rosy contours of the downtown buildings were brightening. All the darkness was growing pearly, warming. They're all of em detectives chasin me, all of em, men in derbies, bums on the Bowery, old women in kitchens, barkeeps, streetcar conductors, bulls, hookers, sailors, longshoremen, stiffs in employment agencies..." "Skyscrapers go up like flames, in flames, flames. He spun back into the room. The table turned a somersault. The chinacloset jumped on the table. Oak chairs climbed on top to the gas jet. Pour on water, Scotland's burning. Don't like the smell in this place in the City of New York, County of New York, State of New York." The former passage precedes Bud's fall; the latter describe's Stan final moments. Both involve heat, the first the warming of the city as the dawn arrives, the second Stan's imagining of New York on fire. "Faint rosy contours" become "flames," but the underlying concept is the same. Simply put, the city is implicated in these characters' private struggles. Stan and Bud - and, in turn, Dos Passos himself - project their pain and frustration onto the physical landscape that surrounds them. New York thus emerges as a kind of spectre, the Grim Reaper of cities, overseeing these men's deaths just as they launch their final gazes upon it. The inanimate is animate, the dead alive: darkness grows while tables and chairs climb and leap. While Bud imagines an army of New Yorker arrayed against him - "all of em detectives" - Stan sees his own apartment slip into motion. By the time he finally lies down it is on the floor of a "revolving kitchen." Beyond the physical, however, money rears its ugly head again. Bud's inability to gain it sends him to his death. Conversely, it is perhaps Stan's wealth that kills him. "A thousand dollar fire, a hundredthousand dollar fire, a million dollar fire," Dos Passos writes. The figure of the father looms over both men as well: he who beats Bud and whose murder haunts the guilt-wracked son; and he who bestows riches on Stan but, so far as we can tell, offers no real love, insists instead that his son follow a certain path to success. The pressures of the poor and of the rich lead to the same demise, Dos Passos seems to argue. Whether or not the two suicides can be interpreted as indicative of a larger ill in the writer's eyes, the parallels they present are no doubt worthy of analysis. When Stan dies, no one comes along to take his place; while Bud is never mentioned after his death, Stan reappears in reference after reference, leaving a lasting mark on those who knew him - most of all, Ellen, the lost princess of New York.

Third Section, Chs. I-III

Summary
I. "REJOICING CITY THAT DWELT CARELESSLY"
James Merivale has just returned from the war in Europe. The year is 1918. Peace has been declared. James gets a shave, looks at himself in the mirror, and walks home. He reunites with Maisie and his mother Emily. The father, Jeff, has died in the influenza epidemic. Ellen and Jimmy are likewise returning to New York. They sit together on a boat headed into the harbor, their baby Martinby their side. "Well there's the statue of Liberty," Jimmy notes, before insisting that the family head out on deck. When they arrive on land they are greeted by their friends Frances and Bob Hildebrand. Frances, Bob, Martin, and Ellen - who Frances calls Helena - drive off to the Brevoort Hotel while Jimmy takes care of the luggage. There they drink cognac and toast to the "Caf d'Harcourt." "Of course what you kids dont realize," Hildebrand says, "is that the difficulty under prohibition is keeping sober."

Baldwin writes Ellen a card and sends it to her room in the Brevoort along with two dozen Gold of Ophir roses. He humbly offers his services to her and her husband and proclaims himself "your lifelong slave and admirer." Joe O'Keefe, now a Sergeant-Major, and Private 1st Class Dutch Robertson, a friend of his, drift through the harbor on a boat, passing under the Brooklyn Bridge and expressing their joy at being home again: "Gosh little old New York's goin to look good to me..." Robertson says he is going to "live clean an get a good job and maybe get married." O'Keefe reckons that is not a bad idea. Jimmy and Ellen - referred to again by people as Helena - eat a meal with the Merivales Emily, Maisie, and James. Jimmy says he might go back to newspaper work. James will likely go work with Major Goodyear, head of the foreign exchange department of the Banker's Trust. The subject of the war comes up - and of Ellen and Jimmy's "war romance." They were both in the Publicity Department of the Red Cross at one point, we learn. When Mrs. Merivale suggests that Jimmy write a book of his experiences in Europe, he replies that he has tried a few articles but that no one seems interested in printing them. "You see I differ radically in certain matters of opinion," he says. Joe O'Keefe leads an organizational meeting of fellow veterans, furious at the scarcity of jobs for returning soldiers and the lack of a bonus. "We fought for em didnt we, we cleaned up the squareheads, didnt we?" he says. "And now when we come home we get the dirty end of the stick." Later he visits a doctor and finds that he has syphilis. "Inevitable in wartime," the doctor assures him. George Baldwin eats at a restaurant with Gus McNeil and a man named Densch, both of whom try to convince Baldwin of running for office. The lawyer shies away from the idea of a political career, but his companions won't give up on him. Densch argues that it is George's duty to run for office, that it is a critical and dangerous time for America. "I happen to know from a secret and reliable source that there is a subversive plot among undesirable elements in this country," he says. "Good God think of the Wall Street bomb outrage. [... In] fact we're approaching a national unity undreamed of before the war." Meanwhile, a boat of deportees floats down the harbor while a gathering crowd murmurs: "They are sending the Reds back to Russia..."

II. "NICKELODEON"
Ruth Prynne runs into Billy Waldron, a friend of hers. She tells him of her troubles - a problem with her throat, the scarcity of acting jobs, etc. Together the two reminisce about the old days. "The last time I saw you Ruth," Billy tells her, "was in The Butterfly on the Wheel in Seattle. I was out front..." Dutch Robertson walks through the nighttime city with his girl Francie. He has been thrown out of his room in the city, is looking for work and can't find anything. Money is a problem. Dutch tells Francie about the war, how he was made a Sergeant but then went AWOL. He insists he can make it in New York, but prospects look grim. The two lovers are thrown out of a Chinese club, then harassed while trying to walk along the wharf, and finally end up sneaking into Francie's room. Jimmy and Ellen go out to dinner in a restaurant by the water. There, to their surprise, they meet Congo. He offers them cocktails and proclaims that he is "the best bootleggair in New York." Ellen, for her part, has decided to take a job rather than dive back into acting - much to Jimmy's dismay. Their relationship seems somewhat frayed. When Jimmy stretches out his legs under their table and touches her feet she draws them away. "Why did we come back to this rotten town anyway?" Jimmy finally demands, once he and Ellen are drunk on absinthe. "Ellie for heaven's sake what's the matter with us?" A girl named Anna dances with a "tall square built Swede," then a "blackhaired slender Jew." She goes from man to man, is "sickeningly tired," and seems to float along - one song after another, one dance after another, until she breaks free and runs to a female companion of hers.

III. "REVOLVING DOORS"

Jake Silverman and Rosie discuss their situation. These two characters seem to be involved in criminal activity that could wind up putting Jake behind bars for larceny. He appears perfectly calm, however, and comforts Rosie with claims that all is well, that he has merely to "bluff out Nichols" and that if they "can keep [Nichols] thinkin [they have] money [they'll] have him eatin out of [their] hands." The Merivales are having breakfast "to electric light." It is sleeting outside. James taunts Maisie about her fiance Jack, a publicist for Famous Players. Maisie complains that James is "horrid about Jack," to which James replies: "Well if he's going to be my brother-inlaw, I think I ought to have a say in picking him." Tony Hunter dances with a girl named Nevada Jones. We have seen her name before, in association with Baldwin. Indeed it turns out that she and Baldwin are dating, but that she thinks little of him and has begun an affair with Tony: "If he thinks he can buy me with a little hotel accomodation and theater tickets he's got another thing coming," she says. Tony, for his part, has begun seeing a Dr. Baumgardt about his "problem," who is convinced his homosexuality is simply a product of his imagination and that Tony should see more girls. "He doesn't know what he's talking about though," Tony tells Nevada. But Nevada insists he stay with the doctor, who incidentally is being paid for by Baldwin himself. The phone rings. It's George. Tony makes a quick getaway and Nevada goes out to lunch with Baldwin and Gus McNeil. The two men discuss business. Baldwin has decided to run for office after all -- but "on a Reform ticket." Gus is shocked. "But Goddam it if it hadn't been for me your name would never have come up for district attorney at all," he argues. "I know you've always been a good friend of mine and I hope you'll continue to be," George replies. Gus McNeil chats with Joe O'Keefe, warning him about his involvement in agitation groups - one of which has recently raided a Garment Workers' Ball - and arguing that "the people of this country are pretty well fed up with war heroes." McNeil talks like a real politician, claiming that New York State has "done its duty by its ex-service men" and that a national bonus would only mean more taxes "to the average business man." Dutch Robertson, hungry, thirsty, forlorn, reads in a paper of two men successfully holding up a bank messenger and making off with half a million dollars. Jimmy visits a waterfront speakeasy - "a long building propped on piles over the water" with Congo. The owner is Mike Cardinale, an Italian immigrant with a French wife to do his cooking. Jimmy sips some wine with the two men and listens to a mechanical piano, when the sound of a motorboat approaches. Congo and Cardinale go out to investigate. A fight ensues and Congo returns with his leg broken. (The leg itself is a cork one; "Cost me feefty dollars to have it mended last time I busted it," Congo tells Jimmy.) Cardinale has a gash over his eyes. The motorboats have sped away. We learn they were carrying hijackers who were trying to steal as much alcohol as they could. Cardinale and Congo have stocked up on champagne for the holidays; one of the cases has been damaged, but otherwise not much has been lost. When Congo asks Cardinale how the hijackers could have known about their landing site, Cardinale replies: "Some guy blabbed maybe." Jimmy heads off, remembering a girl he met at the speakeasy, a girl with "toobright eyes." His reverie drifts to Ellen: "Before the kid was born Ellie sometimes had toobright eyes like that." Finally he thinks to himself: "God why cant I stop mooning over things that are past?" James Merivale receives word from his mother at work that "something terrible has happened." When he returns home he finds "a little roundfaced woman in a round mink hat and a long mink coat" who claims she is Mrs. Jack Cunningham - wife to Maisie's

fiance. She has a marriage certificate to prove it, and is eighteen years old. James is enraged. When he tries phoning Jack's room, he finds that the man is out of town. Phineas Blackhead, employee at an import and export firm, discusses the prospect of backing Baldwin's campaign for office with Densch. Blackhead is opposed to the idea. "Well old man," Densch tells him, "it may have been a bad thing to do, but I've promised to support the reform candidate." Blackhead argues that doing so would be a slap in the face to Gus McNeil and his associates, who have been of great help to the firm. "My dear Blackhead," Densch proclaims, "I consider it my duty to as a citizen to help in cleaning up the filthy conditions of bribery, corruption and intrigue that exist in the city government." Blackhead scoffs, and later confides to his daughter Cynthia in his limousine: "If you ever hear a man talking about his duty as a citizen, by the Living Jingo dont trust him..." Ellen proposes to Jimmy that they get separate rooms, now that he is back to continually working nights. Jimmy protests that they would never see each other as a result. "We hardly ever see each other as is," he says. "It's terrible," Ellen replies, just as Martin's weeping comes "in a gust from the other room." A Jewish girl named Anna goes to an ice cream fountain with Elmer, "a rustyhaired thinfaced young Jew." He chides her for having stopped paying union dues, for being a "fatalist," for not thinking of the larger picture when it comes to her job at a sewing machine. "The trouble with the workers," he argues, "is we dont known nothin, we dont know how to eat, we dont know how to live, we dont know how to protect our rights. [...] Cant you see we're in the middle of a battle just like in the war?" Nellie pays a visit to George Baldwin. She tells him Gus asked her to do so, and tries to persuade him to not run on the reform ticket. George maintains that Gus is a friend of his, but that in "this particular campaign [he has] pledged [himself] to oppose certain elements with which Gus has let himself get involved." George then visits Nevada Jones and abruptly calls of their affair. "I've known for some time that you and Tony Hunter were carrying on," he proclaims. Tony Hunter is, in fact, hiding in Nevada's bedroom at that very moment. Baldwin tells Nevada he will send her a check for five hundred, and that she should never communicate with him again. With that, he heads off. Tony emerges from hiding and laments the turn of events: "O God if I'm not the unluckiest fellow in the world," he sighs. By contrast, Nevada appears totally unfazed. "I set out to make a man of you kiddo," she tells Tony, "and I'm goin to do it." James Merivale runs into Jack Cunningham in a clothing store. Jack invites him to dinner with a man named Randolph Perkins -- one of the vice presidents of James's bank. He asks that if James sees Maisie he tell her that Jack will visit her tomorrow. "An extraordinary series of events has kept me from communicating with her," he says. James agrees to dinner, walks off and phones his mother to inform her he will be dining with Perkins -- as well as Mr. Cunningham. In quite a distortion of the truth, James explains that he has confronted Jack about the crisis with Maisie and has been promised a full explanation within twenty-four hours. Ellen is now an editor for a magazine called Manners. Acting is a thing of the past for her. We find her elegantly dressed and seated in a tea-room with Ruth Prynne. Ruth's own career has not improved much. "Oh Elaine I'm so discouraged," she says. "My dear I'm getting old." Ellen consoles her. She has already said that she too "must be getting old" and is beginning "to hate large parties." Nonetheless, she and Ruth go to a costume party at a nearby dancing studio, where they meet up with Cassandra Wilkins and John Oglethorpe. We learn from John that Tony Hunter has been "straightened out by [his] psychoanalyst" and is now on the vaudeville stage with Nevada Jones. We also learn that Jimmy Herf is known as a "bolshevik pacifist and I.W.W. agitator."

Suddenly, the party is broken up by a raiding police party. The detectives are ready to make arrests for the sale and consumption of liquor, but Ellen, not missing a beat, speedily phones Baldwin at the district attorney's office and asks him to tell the D.A. that the police have made a mistake, and that the raid should be called off. Soon enough the D.A. speaks to the head detective and the charges are dropped. "Accidents will happen..." the detective says. Once home, Ellen calls Baldwin again to thank him. Jimmy, desperate and bubbling over with frustration, knocks on Ellen's door, demanding that they talk. The estranged spouses talk. Jimmy asks Ellen if she still loves him. "I guess I dont love anybody for long unless they're dead," she confesses, in an underhanded allusion to Stan Emery. Jimmy is crushed and suggests a divorce, but Ellen reminds him of Martin: "What about him?" she asks. The conversation does not reach a real resolution. Jimmy simply gives in and leaves. "But things dont end," Ellen says as he goes. Anna passes a group of girls discussing the recent murder of an acquaintance of theirs. "A negro had done somethin terrible to her and then he'd strangled her..." she hears as she walks by. Jake Silverman and Rosie head to their hotel and are met there by an official from the Department of Justice, who wishes to arrest Jake on the grounds of "using the mails to defraud [people]." Jake leaps to his defense: "I am a man who has been deeply wronged through foolishness in misplacing confidence in others," he argues - to no avail. The official and his partner search Jake's room and whisk him off, leaving the teary-eyed Rosie alone with a handwritten note her beau has just written her. It reads: "Hock everything and beat it; you are a good kid."

Analysis
New York has entered a new period of history, and Dos Passos charts it with considerable precision in this section of his novel. Consider the title of the first chapter: "Rejoicing City That Dwelt Carelessly." World War I is over, peace is declared, and a sense of jubilation is in the air. James Merivale emerges as a character in his own right, and we are "introduced" to him on a ship returning to the city - just as Dutch Robertson and Joe O'Keefe, as well as Ellen and Jimmy, make their first appearances of the chapter on a boat. The veterans are returning, and among those who have spent time in Europe are, to our surprise, Ellen and Jimmy, now married. While a conventional novel, intimately concerned about its primary protagonists and their struggles, would likely follow Ellen and Jimmy to the Continent and trace the steps that led to their marriage, not to mention Martin's birth, Dos Passos confines his narrative(s) to New York proper. The Great War exists as a sort of apparition on the horizon; we never experience it firsthand, but we can observe its results on a city thousands of miles away from the conflict. Dos Passos's striking use of ellipses is not restricted to Ellen and Jimmy's "war romance." When "Rejoicing City" begins, Prohibition has already been declared and the influenza epidemic has already hit. Uncle Jeff is dead; Gus McNeil is a budding politico; and one can sense that the city itself as irrevocably changed. Returning to the aforementioned title, "Rejoicing" indicates the euphoria following victory in Europe, while "Carelessly" suggests the problems which lie ahead. In other words, in its joy New York blinds itself to the myriad tragedies which still afflict it. If New York can be said to have "dwelt" (a curious term, since one think of the city being a site of dwelling, rather than something that might itself dwell), it means it too may be interpreted as a character. Perhaps then it is the city that is the true protagonist of the novel. The phase we have entered is thus a time of false pride on the part of that protagonist; "he" thinks himself almighty, untouchable, but cannot indefinitely disregard to the wounds festering beneath the surface. Those wounds are close to Dos Passos's heart, and by extension Jimmy's. Oglethorpe refers to Herf as a "bolshevik pacifist," and Jimmy finally quits his newspaper job in a later chapter, calling off professional life and participation in the capitalist apparatus for a

time. The political convictions these labels refer to involve, in this case, the great chasms of wealth that exist in New York. Dos Passos depicts what amounts to a return to feudalism, with the lords dwelling high up in their skyscraper-castles, looking down over the huddled masses of the poor and "undesirable." One of the great tragic moments in Manhattan Transfer is the deportation of the "Reds" - a brief moment which lasts only a few paragraphs, but which resonates in the mind, especially due to the young girl beginning to sing the "Internationale" and being abruptly quieted. Bolshevism, Dos Passos seems to suggest, though it may be flawed, at least casts light on the inequities of American urban life in a way the flag-waving capitalist system simply cannot. Though Dos Passos later rejected his leftist leanings and turned against communism, at the time he wrote this novel he was still very much an idealist, somewhat under the sway of East Coast American intellectuals and fellow writers such as Ernest Hemingway. In New York he saw a den of inequality - the rush of modernity coexisting with a near-medieval social apparatus that ruthlessly pitted rich against poor. Consider Dutch Robertson's desperation. Unable to carve out a life with his girlfriend Francie, despite his war veteran status, Dutch finally reads of a hold-up in a paper and decides to follow a similar course of action. We can hardly blame him for turning to crime. As Dos Passos portrays it, the city forces Dutch to that decision. Even seemingly insignificant vignettes, such as Elmer and Anna in the ice cream shop, resonate with the larger social conflict. "Cant you see we're in the middle of a battle just like in the war?" Elmer asks Anna. Therein lies the true problem - and the veritable tragedy that New York has fallen prey to. The victory of World War I is a hollow one. The streets are crowded for a time with revelers: but what exactly are they celebrating? Soon enough, things return to normal, and the idealists realize that nothing was gained. The poor are still poor; workers are still oppressed; jobs are still scarce. Even the homecoming soldiers do not receive what was promised to them. The return to the status quo (underlined by the cyclical connotation of the chapter title "Revolving Doors," just as the "grand illusion" of World War I and the ensuing Jazz Age finds a convenient metaphor in the title "Nickelodeon") is particularly painful for some, and Gus McNeil is finally forced to confide to Joe O'Keefe that "the people of this country are pretty well fed up with war heroes." In short, the rejoicing is fleeting, but the "carelessness" is far longer-lasting. Aside from Dutch's transition to crime, we witness Jake Silverman's downfall for fraud and George Baldwin's decision to run for office after all - but on a reform ticket. The city needs change, and flag-waving is not the answer.

Third Section, Chs. IV-V

Summary
IV. "SKYSCRAPER"
Jimmy has just quit his job. "Life was upside down," Dos Passos writes. "[He] was a fly walking on the ceiling of a topsyturvy city." Dutch has obtained a gun. Francie asks him what he plans to use it for. She is worried, and can sense that her man has resorted to desperate measures. She tells Dutch that she is scared, but he assures her he has everything under control. "I've told you I had a way o fixing everythin, aint I?" he says. "I promise you I'll fix everythin fine in a couple of days... We'll go away an git married. We'll go down South..." Anna's mother harshly scolds her. "Oy what for have I raised four children that they should all of them be no good, agitators and streetwalkers and bums?" she cries. We learn that Anna has been picketing for the striking garment workers. She snaps back at her mother, who promptly throws her out of the house in a fit. We next find her talking with friends of hers on a street corner. She hears of a hold-up in "Ike Goldstein's shop,"

in which gunmen apparently "busted up everythin wid hammers." Later she meets up withElmer, and complains to him about the strike, wishing it would end. He assures her that "the strike is the workers' great opportunity." Jimmy talks with Alice and Roy, a couple and friends of his. He mentions that he is thinking of leaving New York in a couple of weeks. Dutch, wearing "a light gray spring overcoat and a light felt hat to match," meets up with Francie and tells her he stuck up a cigar store. A reporter named Brewster, who is writing an article on the crime wave in the city, interviews Ike Goldstein about the hold-up in his store. Goldstein describes a "welldressed lookin feller" and a girl with a veil sticking him up and stealing "about fifty berries an six dollars." He continues: "They ought to make it the electric chair for those babies... Aint no security nowhere. Vy should anybody voirk if all you've got to do is get a gun and stick up your neighbors?" The reporter tells Goldstein he is working on a theory that the bandits were a college boy and his society girl. Jimmy reads an article in the newspaper about Dutch Robertson, who has been arrested with his "girl companion." "The pair are accused of committing more than a score of holdups in Brooklyn and Queens," the text reads. Suspicion of Dutch was stoked, we learn, when his girl, "about to become a mother," was taken to the hospital, where she was given "a private room, expensive flowers and fruit." Where did all of Dutch's money come from? Moreover, when it came time to register the name of the baby, Dutch admitted he and the girl were in fact not married. One of the hospital attendants noticed that the girl fit the description of the so-called "flapper bandit" and telephoned the authorities.

V. "THE BURTHEN OF NINEVEH"

Densch tries to comfort his wife Serena on the deck of a boat. They are on their way to Marienbad, away from New York for good it seems. "Our position isnt so hopeless," Densch says. He blames Phineas Blackhead for bringing "the firm to...to this." He adds: "That man thinks he's king on earth..." We may assume the situation has something to do with Densch's support of the reform platform and his defiant stance against Blackhead. "Well Serena," he concludes, "this is the end of my business career." Martin, in an echo of an earlier passage involving Ellen as a little girl alone in bed, "lies tossing within the iron bars of his crib," fearing the "the horrible great dark of grownup people" outside. Ellen meets George Baldwin in a hotel lobby. They eat in the hotel dining room, and Baldwin makes sure to readily mention that Cecily has finally agreed to divorce him. "Now what I want to know is, will you...?" he begins to ask, but she interrupts him: "George lets eat our dinner first. [...] God knows we've messed things up enough in the past both of us... Let's drink to the crime wave." While they eat, Ellen feels "a gradual icy coolness" invading her. "She had made up her mind," Dos Passos writes. Finally George puts the question to her a second time: "Well what about it?" She softly replies: "I guess I can stand it if you can George." Baldwin is overjoyed. He kisses her in the taxicab leaving the hotel, but all Ellen sees "whirling faces, streetlights, zooming nickelglinting wheels" through the car's window. Alice Sheffield meets up with "a tall blond Englishman" named Buck. It quickly becomes apparent that she is having an affair with him. He proposes she go to Calgary with him. She agrees. "In his Majesty's Dominion," Buck notes, "the name of Buckminster has rather more weight than in the U.S." "Oh I know darling," she responds, "it's nothing but money in New York." She tells Buck of a recent discovery in her apartment building - that the woman above her floor has been performing illegal abortions and the clogging the plumbing with the results. She and Buck head to a train station, and there she suddenly

feels "alone and tiny in the middle of the great white vault." Dos Passos writes: "All her life with Roy was going by her like a movie reeled off backwards, faster and faster." A "man with whiskers like a bottecleaner" rails about the end of times to two younger men, Joe and Skinny, who are reluctant to listen to his tirade. "Scared of me cause I'm a tramp aint you?" the man asks Joe and Skinny. "Tramps won't hurt ye, they're good people. The Lord God was a tramp when he lived on earth." He continues with his rant: "There's more wickedness in one block in New York City than there was in a square mile in Nineveh, and how long do you think the Lord God of Sabboath will take to destroy New York City an Brooklyn an the Bronx? Seven seconds." Jimmy takes a ride in a limousine with Congo, who has soared to the height of wealth and luxury through his criminal activities. "Call me Armand," he tells Jimmy. "I'm married now; Armand Duval, Park Avenue." "[If] I'd been God," Jimmy says, "and had to decide who in this city should make a million dollars and who shouldnt I swear you're the man I should have picked. [...] The difference between you and me is that you're going up the social scale, Armand, and I'm going down. [...] But here I am by Jesus Christ almost thirty years old and very anxious to live..." We learn from Jimmy that Ellen is indeed going to marry Baldwin, who has just been appointed District Attorney. "They're said to be grooming him for mayor on a fusion reform ticket," Jimmy adds. Later Jimmy runs into Nevada Jones in the marble hall of Armand's apartment building. It is she who has married Armand. Tony Hunter is history. "Tony's one of God's mistakes," she tells Jimmy. James Merivale sits in the ritzy Metropolitan Club and reads the Wall Street Journal. He reads of the economic depression, the postwar slump, and Blackhead and Densch: "BLACKHEAD & DENSCH FAIL FOR $10,000,000." Densch has left the country and Blackhead is "incommunicado in his home at Great Neck." Merivale's thoughts drift to Jack Cunningham. "Good connection that feller," he thinks. "Maisie knew what she was doing after all... A man in a position like that's always likely to be blackmailed." Next comes Jimmy Herf - "an out and out failure, a misfit from way back." Merivale thinks of Jimmy's divorce, of Ellen's reputation for sleeping around, as if satisfied by his cousin's "Ten Million Dollar Failure." Then he fantasizes about his own great success. Anna is about to sleep with a man named Dick. She insists that she is no whore. Her nerves are on edge. When Dick asks her why she is so "quick tonight," she replies: "This strike an the old woman trowin me out an scabbin up at Soubrine's...it'd get anybody's goat." Florence sits in her room and reads the Sunday papers. She is the woman who claims to have been Jack Cunningham's wife. Jack and Maisie have now married. Florence reminisces about her high school marriage to Jack: "It was a lovely Sunday morning." Dutch Robertson is in a courtroom. Francie stands nearby. The judge decides to make an example of Dutch and sentences him to twenty years in prison. Francie faints. Phineas Blackhead lies in bed, waited on by his daughter Gladys. He rails on and on: "We'd have pulled through if he hadnt lost his nerve. Serve me right for taking such a yellow sop into partnership... Twentyfive, thirty years of work all gone to hell in ten minutes..." When he finally calms down, he concedes that the only thing to do is "sell out." "I'll sell every goddamn thing I've got," he says. He thanks God that "Gladys is settled." Ellen picks up a dress at Madame Soubrine's clothing shop. She has given up her job, a move of which Soubrine approves. In a back room of the shop, Anna sews the trimming on a dress, daydreaming about her future with Elmer and his ideas of the impending Revolution. Suddenly a fire starts. Anna leaps back. Ellen smells the smoke from the front of the store. Madame Soubrine rushes back to take care of the problem. Ellen stands outside on the street with a gathering crowd of spectators, as the burned Anna is carried out of the store on stretchers. "She wont die," a policeman tells her, "but it's

tough on a girl." Ellen finds herself inexplicably moved, as if she were the one being dragged along on a stretcher. "Why should I be so excited?" she asks herself. "Just somebody's bad luck, the sort of thing that happens everyday." Jimmy prepares to leave New York. We find him with Bob and Frances Hildebrand, drinking gin and dancing with a nameless girl. "So long you mysterious traveler," Bob says. "Let us have your address, do you hear?" Before long, Jimmy is waiting for a ferry to arrive. He travels down the river - to where exactly we don't know. Once on land, he "hurries through cavernous gloom and out to a fogblurred street." He spends a quarter on breakfast, which leaves him three cents in his pocket - "three cents for good luck, or bad for that matter." He asks a truck driver for a lift. "How fur ye goin?" the "redhaired man at the wheel" asks him. "I dunno," Jimmy replies. "Pretty far."

Analysis
"Out of the empty dark fog of the river, the ferryslip yawns all of a sudden, a black mouth with a throat of light." In one of the final passages of Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos alludes to the very first chapter of the novel: "Ferryslip." Doublings, symmetrical placements, and reflections are devices of which Dos Passos makes extensive use in structuring his sprawling work. In this case, however, the reference to the novel's beginning is not merely a structural tool, but a thematic one. If the city is Dos Passos's prime character, his "hero" so to speak, then his story is history itself. The question then emerges: what exactly is history? A forward progression? A linear narrative? A journey from one point to another? The answer Dos Passos provides lies in the aforementioned quote: by starting a new life and leaving the city, Jimmy is really only returning to his beginnings; history, just like the individual's narrative, bends back on itself, repeats and remolds the same events, the same patterns. History is cyclical, merely a set of "revolving doors." World War I, for example, seems to provide an opportunity for lasting change - but, just as the earlier chapters of Manhattan Transfer's Third Section have shown, that prospect of transformation is an illusion. The city goes on as before; the poor stay poor, the rich stay rich. The wartime economy may boom, but by the time we find James Merivale seated in the Metropolitan Club reading The Wall Street Journal, the country is in the midst of a postwar slump. The Jazz Age allows for someone like Congo to miraculously reappear as a millionaire in a limousine - Armand Duval of Park Avenue - but it likewise drives Dutch Robertson to prison. Both men are criminals; one ends up in a swanky marble palace, the other in a penitentiary for twenty years. The fundamental patterns stay the same, Dos Passos argues. The last paragraph of the novel, in which we find Jimmy "walking along a cement road between dumping grounds full of smoking rubbishpiles" specifically recalls the first passage of Jimmy's manhood: "Jimmy Herf picked his way along the edge of the road; the stones were sharp against his feet through the worn soles of his shoes." (First Section, Chapter V. "Steamroller") In both scenes dawn is arriving, the waterfront is near, and Jimmy climbs a hill. Our protagonist is doomed, like Sisyphus, to climb the same hill over and over again it would seem. What then becomes of Ellen, who once fancied herself a princess in a magical city? She remains such a fantastic apparition to Jimmy. As their relationship crumbles, his dreams of her soar: "Ellie in a gold dress, Ellie made of thin gold foil absolutely lifelike beckoning from every window." She herself seems to recognize that she has become akin to a photograph in the eyes of the men who surround her, the men who love her - much like the photograph Jimmy spots in the newspaper Joe Harland drops. "It seemed as if she had set the photograph of herself in her own place," Dos Passos writes, "forever frozen into a single gesture." As with Jimmy, Ellen may restlessly move from job to job, from man to man; yet something inside her will always remain frozen. To some degree she will always be a static image. The illusion of change for the city as a whole reflects the same illusion in its inhabitants. Do Ellen, Jimmy, and the rest ever really change, as characters of a conventional novel would?

There is no easy answer to that question. Returning to the earlier quote, "a black mouth with a throat of light" suggests the clichd vision of the light at the end of the tunnel. Yet, in Dos Passos's world, the light may be a false one, a red herring. Has Jimmy reached a new sense of self-awareness, of enlightenment? Or is he simply running away from his problems? The last line of the novel is his answer to the truck driver's question. "Pretty far," he says. The truth is he does not know where he wants to go. He simply needs to move. In this closing passage, Jimmy recalls Hemingway's characters, particularly Jake Barnes, lost in Europe, unsure of what he wants, and prefigures the later heroes of the American road: the aimless drifters of the 50's Beat generation and of 70's American cinema. Indeed, one of the most striking features of Dos Passos's novel is its combination of doctrine and uncertainty: while the writer makes clear his opinions of New York's social divides, his feelings on racism, corruption, and oppression of the lower classes, he withholds any clear-cut judgment of his characters. Moral ambiguity is what best characterizes and links the various interweaving storylines of the novel. While drawing from older literary traditions in creating his protagonists - Ellen recalls nineteenthcentury heroines such as Emma Bovary and Effi Briest, while Jimmy seems to spring from the picaresque novels of a Fielding or a Thackeray, while the loss of his mother suggests an upper-class reworking of a Dickens scenario - Dos Passos, to the extent to which he strips away judgment and obfuscates message, presents the reader with inherently novel and decidedly twentieth-century creations.

Dos Passos's Style: The Filmic in Prose

Manhattan Transfer is characterized by a multiplicity of perspectives. Though certain characters do appear more frequently than others, Dos Passos suggests that everyone is equally important. His is a novel more in the vein of the "democratic" structures of nineteenth-century English literature than the highly individualized novel of consciousness that emerged with Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. And yet, Joyce and Woolf do exert a great deal of influence on Dos Passos's writing; and there is something decidedly "twentieth-century" about the style ofManhattan Transfer. The city is viewed as a deconstructed (to borrow a later term) totality, fragmented into various angles and vantage points like a Cubist painting -- or like a film. Glimpses form a collective gaze, and in this sense Dos Passos is following in the footsteps of some of the avant-garde urban portrait films of his era, most obviously Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's Manhatta(1921), as well as anticipating the techniques expounded by the great "city symphony" films of the 1920's, particularly Vertov's monumental Man With a Movie Camera (1929) and Walter Ruttman's no less significant Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927). That films provide the benchmark for analyzing Dos Passos's style is itself significant. The writer's reliance on visual imagery and famed skipping of transitions suggest the shots and jump cuts of cinema; his insistence on remaining on the outside of a given event, such as the young man's talk with his sweetheart in this chapter, withholding certain key details - such as the man's name - lend the writing a kind of offthe-cuff documentary flavor, more reminiscent of the immediacy of filmmaking than the careful process and labored psychology of literature (or what it had become in the nineteenth century). A closer look at the aforementioned scene offers some insights into Dos Passos's stylistic choices. Rather than intervening via an all-knowing narrator, Dos Passos relies on what can be seen and heard, not on what backstory the characters may bring to the moment. Emily is simply "a girl in a flowered bonnet" until we "hear" her boyfriend call her by her name. We have no real sense of the boy's inner reaction to her aloofness until he says: "God! I hate her. I hate her." The one glimmer of interiority Dos Passos offers us remains restricted to the purely physical: "the tears that were hot in his eyes," a piece of information which could not be deduced by observation alone.

Aside from that one instance, Dos Passos adopts and maintains a strictly observational stance in this scene, one which relegates the characters' interaction to the immediacy (and therefore ephemerality) of the "moment." The very brevity of such a vignette helps underline this approach: these are fly-on-the-wall snapshots of a metropolis, and we have no guarantee we will ever see this boy and girl ever again. The format recalls the one-shot, thirty-second films of teens (the decade during which the events of "Metropolis" seem to transpire), and indeed Dos Passos calls a later chapter "Nickelodoen." To take another example, as "Dollars" opens we are introduced to George Baldwin, who will become one of the novel's recurrent characters (perhaps the most important individual in the book next to Ellen and Jimmy). He is at this time an ambitious but frustrated young lawyer, and, as usual, before entering his psyche Dos Passos presents Baldwin as if he were merely an image captured by a camera or a wandering eye: "A leanfaced young man with steel eyes and a thin high-bridged nose sat back in a swivel chair with his feet on his new mahogany-finish desk." Only three sentences later, Baldwin's thoughts have become incorporated into the prose, without even the separation of quotation marks: "Damn it I dont care." This sudden shift is indicative of Dos Passos's restless energy as a stylist: the objective and the subjective, the macro and the micro continually collide and interact in his prose; both the city and the characters who inhabit it are constantly in flux, grasped here and there from different vantage points. The aforementioned "jump cut" in a Dos Passos passage involves a bridging of a time/space gap without use of paragraph indentation or time markers. In this case, Baldwin's journey to the chophouse on Maiden Lane is remarkably condensed. Consider the following sentence: "He straightened his vest and brushed some flecks off his shoes with a handkerchief, then, contracting his face into an expression of intense preoccupation, he hurried out of his office, trotted down the stairs and out onto Maiden Lane. In front of the chophouse he saw the headline..." The act of straightening the vest occupies more "page space," as one might put it, than that of exiting the office and walking to the eatery. From the syntax, one might even surmise that the contracting of Baldwin's face lasts the entire duration of his journey out of the office. Finally, the actual transition from "out onto Maiden Lane" to "the chophouse" is simply skipped; the period that separates the two sentences operates much as a cut does in a film, rupturing the temporal and spatial continuum and implying an absence - thereby rendering the invisible visible, so to speak. What is most important in this brief passage is the democratization of the language, and the subtle subjectivity imposed on everyday actions; the brushing off of a vest is not so much separated from the physical journey through space as blended into it, forming an organic whole indicative of being. Less emphasis is placed on the most dramatic element of the scene - Baldwin exiting into the open air and the bustle of the city - than on the seemingly mundane circumstances that surround and inform it - namely, the vest, the contracting of the face, etc. Dos Passos takes a moment of everyday existence and magnifies certain portions of it within a single unity - i.e. the sentence. Thus, his technique here is a strange and unsettling mixture of Woolf's immediacy, the "jump cut," and the roving camera in cinema (already a notable phenomenon in the work of F. W. Murnau, whose experiments paved the way for the democratization of the frame via Renoir and Welles). Returning to the narrative, Dos Passos quickly follows his foray into subjective technique with an act of "the author" - that is to say, a reminder of the larger world which the author has established. New York is Dos Passos's canvas, and with Baldwin's discovery of Gus McNeil's accident in the paper, the novelist provides his first overt criss-crossing of storylines: Baldwin and McNeil are now linked, and Nellie, before we even meet her, is implicitly established as the problematic linchpin. Just as Gus's accident is "re-viewed," to a certain extent, through Baldwin's eyes, via the article in the paper, so is Nellie's beauty refracted through a variety of lenses. It is worth recalling Gus's dialogue with the

bartender at the end of "Metropolis." "She's a real sweet girl Nellie is," says the latter. "Those little spitcurls o hers'd drive a feller crazy." Well, drive "a feller" crazy is exactly what they do in the following chapter. Their target: the hapless George Baldwin. The first description of Nellie notes her "wavy redbrown hair" and "little flat curls." We are seeing her through Baldwin's eyes, and apparently the lawyer shares the same impression as the bartender: Nellie's beauty is immediately evident, but is most pronounced in the color and form of her hair. Dos Passos's emphasis on color informs the following passage, describing Baldwin's return from Nellie's apartment, and positing the white of snow as a lyrical answer to the red of her hair, of his cheeks, and of his blood: "Baldwin staggered dizzily down the stairs. His head was full of blood. The most beautiful girl I've ever seen in my life. Outside it had begun to snow. The snowflakes were cold furtive caresses to his hot cheeks."