“THIS FINAL AND DEFIANT GESTURE”: THE IMPORTANCE OF C. GREEN IN THOMAS WOLFE’S YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

Abstract

With his final, posthumously published, novel, Thomas Wolfe digs deep into the human condition and comes to the conclusion that people, as a group and as a collective, deny the importance of individual existence. All people are “nameless atoms” and as an individual existence each individual being serves only as an obstacle to others as a group. This article observes the life and death of one of those “man-swarm atoms” and explores what it means in a deeper philosophical and existential sense using Albert Camus’s philosophy of revolt.