The Challenges That Lie Ahead (Extra Credit)

As a member of the Millennial Generation, I often tire of hearing my elders dramatically fretting about the issues we face these days, as if these will be the things to bring about the end of life as we know it. The pervasiveness of technology, the ubiquity of media, and the seeming deficiency of morality are all credible threats, but you would think that the world is without hope because it will someday be up to our incommunicable and out of touch generation to solve them. “Kids these days.” It frequently occurs to me that our grandparents probably shook their head similarly at our parents, and our great-grandparents at our grandparents, and so on and so forth. Every generation has issues they must face.

And so over the course of this class it has also occurred to me that these issues are the challenges posed to the writers of modern American novels. Racism, terrorism, and consumerism are all concerns of today, as well as subject dealt with in the novels we have read.  In Beloved, Toni Morrison forces the contemporary reader to consider the ways in which the history of slavery still haunts modern America.  White Noise debates the superficiality of capitalist ideals. And Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close considers the ways in which post-September 11 America loves, grieves, and communicates, effectively or not.

These are all matters at the forefront of public debate and, while the average citizen can afford to evade or circumvent forming an opinion on them, it is the responsibility of the modern American novelist to wrestle with these questions until they come to some sort of arguable conclusion. By using stories that can make us laugh and characters that make us cry, they can also make us think about the things we would rather avoid. Through literature, we can stand to stare our troubles square in the face.

So maybe our generation is a bit more out of touch than those that came before us. And maybe these problems we face are too cumbersome for us to deal with right this very minute. But it seems to me that if we get our peers to read more of the great modern American novels, we would all be better equipped for the challenges that lie ahead.