`Manhattan Transfer

The principle of organization suggests the cinema 's montage : separate shots combine into an over-all impression of the metropolis but not into a plot

The real `meat ' of Manhattan Transfer comes in the host of human moths more or less singed or wilted , who flutter and swarm round the lights of Broadway and Fifth Avenue - tramps , drunkards , wastrels homo-sexualists , prostitutes more or less accredited , `Villagers waiters , bootleggers and ruffians , with the shadow of Jefferson Market Night Court somehow never far from their shoulders . These people are stunned by city noises (the

thunder of the elevated recurs again and again like a motif in a symphony ) and sickened by its smells : they crave its pleasures , yet hate the work that pays for them : they smother down their heartaches with food and drink they cheat - themselves the oftenest they can conceive of life nowhere else than in the prison-city that is turning their faces gray before their hair . `The terrible thing of having New York go flat on you is that there 's nowhere else . It 's the top of the world . All we can do is go round and round in a squirrel cage (220 . Thus George Baldwin , the hard-boiled corporation lawyer , in a moment of depression , or dyspepsia

In Manhattan Transfer , Dos Passos does not write exclusively about one neighborhood in New York the real subject of the novel is nothing less than the whole of Manhattan itself , and hence the city of New York . Even the structure of the novel bears a considerable resemblance to the streets of New York , long and diverse , fragmented and disjointed Although Dos Passos still presents New York as a glamorous and opulent city , what he tries to suggest is the horrible consequence of being trapped in all the flaws in New York society...