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The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit

Decent Essays

Similarly to Ellis in American Psycho, Sloan Wilson suggests the harmful essence of the ambitious quest for riches in America first, by connecting money and material to violence in a more realistic and believable sense. Where Bret Easton Ellis uses bloody caricature of the wealthy to criticize the “American Dream,” Sloan Wilson takes a different approach, describing a realistic domain that more accurately reflects the lives of the middle class. In The Man in The Gray Flannel Suit, Tom Rath races through his mind searching for impressive stats to share with his possible future employer, then admitting, “Another statistical fact came to him then, a fact which he knew would be ridiculously melodramatic to put into an application for a job a …show more content…

In The Man in The Gray Flannel Suit, as Wilson opens up the novel, he describes the Rath family’s house, stating, “the house had a kind of evil genius for displaying proof of their weaknesses and wiping out all traces of their strengths” (Wilson 1). Throughout the novel, Tom and Betsy Rath’s house is a cause of their insatiable and stagnate depression. By giving the house possession of the trait “evil genius” before even introducing the main characters, Wilson gives Tom and Betsy Rath’s house agency and control over its owners. Despite having a respectable house, the Rath’s longing for more obstructs their ability to be happy in with their house. Tom and Betsy’s “American Dream” is the source of their discomfort- it is the source of the “evil genius” in their pleasant yet simple house. Just before the Rath family goes to church, Wilson states, “Pete was in gray flannel shorts and a brown jacket” (Wilson 129). From a young age, Pete, Tom’s son, dresses to mirror his father, who incidentally mirrors the style of thousands of other men in the city. By dressing Pete the same way as his father when they leave the house, Wilson proposes the hopelessness of any deviation from the path paved by the men in gray flannel suits. Tom Rath’s “American Dream” of financial success locks not only himself, but his children into a strict and rigid path devoid of character and hostile to creativity and

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