There's no great American novel, they're all severely flawed

> There's no great American novel, they're all severely flawed.

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Honestly all the Ameri-hate just comes from the fact we have a vastly different ideology than the rest of the world.

I feel like this is an objectively wrong statement. You can't speak in absolutes when discussing something as subjective as literature, because everyone's opinions are different. But to say that in the last two hundred or so years, no American novel was published that held any merit is a tall order.
There are several traditional, or "meme" answers, like The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, and The Catcher in the Rye. You may disagree with them , but the sheer amount of people who are familiar with these works show their impact on American literature, and indeed literature as a whole.

At the end of the day, a novel doesn't necessarily need to have Byzantine circumstances and Olympian themes to be discussed in a thousand years. To be "great" has to be read by a lot of people. Thats it.
You can't deny, Americans have produced some of the most popular pieces of fiction.

>moby dick

Moby Dick is GOAT, pleb

Euroshits are the most insecure bunch in the world.

Hates just a deeper form of admiration.

Let em watch.

Moby Dick
Washington Square (my personal favorite)
The Sound and the Fury
Naked Lunch
White Noise
Red Harvest
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Beloved
Gravity's Rainbow
A Farewell to Arms
On The Road
Their Eyes were Watching God
etc.

Thanks for including a couple token wocs.

idk beloved is one of my actual favorite books
and i can see why zora neale is canon

for me though American lit really got good during the cold/vietnam war. so many good books built around that era

I think the biggest problem that America's writers have is that we feel the need to define "the great american novel." You never really hear much about "the great French novel" "the great Russian novel" or "the great British novel. other countries just write books. While better writing is something to strive for, I think this idea's existence in the first place just shows our own insecurity about the writers and books we've produced. There seems to be an underlying feeling of inadequacy, so we need this elusive holy grail to make everything right.

That's fine. I'm actually more upset by your inclusions of Naked Lunch and On the Road

The great american novel was a nineteenth century meme that grew out of the insecure feeling americans had that they hadnt produced any worthwhile literature. It was stupid even at the time because americans failed to acknowledge the great writers they already had like hawthorne and melville, and by the middle of the twentieth century, after henry james and fitzgerald and hemingway and faulkner and dos passos, and after american started to appreciate their nineteenth century talents, it became obvious that american lit had great stuff, and had for a long time, and the great american novel meme should have died then but for some reason didnt. We still talk about the great american novel as if it hasnt been written, when the reality is that even when the question 'wheres a great american novel?' started being asked, there were a number of them, so its always been a dumb thing.

There is no Great American Novel but there was a Great American Novelist

naked lunch is good tho and on the road is the essential 21 year old book
they have importance

When you're on top you got face the scrutiny.

I think it has to do with the fact that other, older countries had their national epics, but the United States was founded around a time epic poetry was falling out of fashion, so Americans decided to look for a novel to fill that void. Of course, there are still plenty of great American epic poems.

Yes but when the question started being asked, it wasnt even about a national epic or a novel that would sum up the whole nation. It wasnt THE great american novel, it was just A great american novel, people just wanted a really great novel that was by an american they could hold up and use in arguments. Somewhere along the line (I guess this is why we're still talking about it), the conversation shifted from A novel to THE novel, which Is how the search survives.

I'd say the search is pretty much dead at this point. There are two or three contenders for the best American novel that most people agree upon (Moby-Dick, Huck Finn, maybe something by Faulkner), and everyone's satisfied with that.

American lit died in the 90s when new sincerity failed because bitter cynicism and irony is the dominating mode of thought since the 60s

Okay what the fuck is this "new sincerity" bullshit everyone keeps talking about?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity
>Its usage dates back to the mid-1980s; however, it was culturally popularized in the 1990s by American author David Foster Wallace.
Oh, crap! It was Mr "I'm trying too hard to be profound" who spread that shit.

And then there's metamodernism.

>"oscillation to be the natural order of the world" and called for an end to "the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child." Instead, it proposed metamodernism as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons." The text cited the work of Vermeulen and van den Akker, and concluded “we must go forth and oscillate!”

Reminds me of the scene in The Fountainead where the writers and artists are doing totally different things yet no one is an individual. Fuark! Fantastic fiction is a better way.

You made a mistake with the capitalization.

It's true that there is no Great American Novel. But there are many great American novels.