McCann, Let The Great World Spin Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

McCann, Let The Great World Spin - Essay Example In the opening lines of the novel itself, there is a blunt reference to the twin tower attack, and the first view of the novelist’s fictional world that the reader gets, is the people in the New York city streets, watching upwards, tilting their heads, which has a premonition-like resemblance to the images that were flashed on television, years later, when the twin towers fell. Corrigan’s blind faith is the ideology that sets the tone of the novel. So it becomes easy for one of the protagonists (Corrigan’s brother) to say that â€Å"he never rejected the world† (McCann, 20). Such a conforming posture before the vices and miseries of the world is also in conformity with the way, America handled the ‘war on terrorism’. The hope expressed in the novel had no connection with the realities of the people of Afghanistan or Iraq. What happened in the twin tower incident was repeated by America a million times in these countries, which took away the mo ral right of the nation to preach hope and peace. And in the novel, whenever the war is mentioned, the propagator of the war is explicitly absent, as if war was a natural disaster. This is why the novelist, in almost all his sentences, makes war the grammatical ‘subject’, and not the object of action by another subject. For example, one of the narrators is heard to say, â€Å"the war kicked in, and she got all messed up in it† (McCann, 49). When one of the protagonists says, â€Å"this was not the America that I expected†, he was referring to the dark ghettos of South Bronx, but by placing, Corrigan, the Christ look alike, in those ghettos, a virtual kind of solution is offered by the novel (McCann, 32). Throughout the book, one is reminded that though reaching out to the victims is a good deed, preventing victimization is far more difficult a task, of which every one wants to shed responsibility. The puritan approach of the novelist is evident from the