In American Literature this week we spent a class studying a quote from Tom about the Great Depression. He says, "To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, where the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy." Every student in my class wrote their own paragraph about the imagery in this quotation as a rough draft for a prepared reading paragraph. But I want to focus more on what this quotation implies about the cause of the Great Depression, rather than the literary devices used in it.
Clearly, there's a lot that can be read into these few lines. It's an interesting metaphor throughout, but I want to look specifically toward the beginning: "Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes...." Who exactly does Tom blame in this? Where does he place the responsibility? Oftentimes, when proposing two options, writers will place the more significant one second. The first option might be logical, then the second contradicts it and is more thought-provoking. Maybe because it is meant to correct the first. Maybe because the more recent option will stick in the reader's mind. But either way, it's a trick that I've noticed time and time again. But does it apply here? The unusualness of the second concept - failing one's eyes instead of one's eyes failing- seems to say yes, the second option is meant to be considered more than the first.
What this comes down to, in my opinion, is the blame game. Do we blame the whole society for the failure of the economy? Do we blame the economic system itself? Can we even place blame squarely on any one thing? There are so many different theories as to what caused the Great Depression that it seems impossible that it could be any singular cause. More likely, the matter is too complicated to grasp within one 384-word blog post. But the general conceptual question remains: Do we fail society, or does society fail us? Can we fault a system that we ourselves created without faulting ourselves?
