"Citizen Kane", "The Great Gatsby", and Some Conventions of American Narrative

Abstract

It is widely thought that what finally characterizes American literary narratives is a preoccupation with Americanness. If of European fiction has been man's life in society, Walter Allen writes in The Modern Novel, the great theme of American fiction has been exploration of what it means to be an American. The best American film narratives also seem to bear out this proposition, especially those of great American naturals like Griffith and Ford and Hawks, and most especially Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), regarded by many as greatest American film. Welles' film belongs to that category of narratives which take a prominent figure from contemporary American life (here William Randolph Hearst) and use him to stand for what are conceived to be representative traits of collective American character. Understandably, then, there are many general resemblances in film to other well-known stories of American entrepreneurs, magnates, and tycoons. Long before flourishing of tycoon biographies in American sound film, well before F. Scott Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser, before even Henry James, certain conventions and associations had become well established in stories of this type. The up-and-coming young American was shrewd and practical, an image of compulsive energy, a man with his eye always on future. His Americanness also consisted of such traits as enterprise, indomitable idealism, a certain naturalness and openness to experience, and a relentless will to succeed. His geographical origin could be made to carry moral force, and he or another character who equated American commerical noblesse oblige with universal morality could be a useful thematic touchstone.