In Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos has created a literary work that resembles his own personal image of the city: swarming with unconnected impressions, structurally beautiful in spite of many small uglinesses, and bewilderingly complex. Finding a central theme to this word-city can be as difficult as finding a central meaning to the real one; experiencing the novel is meant to be much like experiencing the city itself.

The phrases complex and composite and fragmentary and limited are perfect descriptions of this novel, in almost every respect. Dos Passos has chosen the video-montage as his model for both content and style, and the too-rapid flow of images may distract the reader at first from noticing that this imitation of city life is also an interpretation. The urban jumble of Manhattan Transfer seems to defy thematic analysis, until one realizes that its seeming discontinuity of theme is actually a theme of discontinuity.

Stylistically, Dos Passos's techniques are highly effective in creating the impression of a video-montage. The text gives us auditory cues to let us hear what's going on; for instance, it approximates the rapid torrent of typical New Yorker speech with run-on sentences and elimination of apostrophes, and spells out every odd pronunciation in the accents of both locals and foreigners, as with Emile's elongated vowels and Cassie's habitual slurring of r into w.

Occasionally we see the city-as-montage from a specific character's point of view, and the text becomes a short series of sentence fragments describing the sensory input of the scene from a specific character's point of view, as with Jimmy Herf's first close look at the docks:

At other times, the camera eye of the text is more discriminating, zooming in on the one particular facet of a scene it wants us to pay attention to:

What the "camera" chooses to show us, in the middle of this idealistic-sounding discussion of politics, is this symbol of prosperity and wealth: an expensive knife cutting into an expensive steak. The entire conversation is colored by the visual image, in a very cinematic technique.

(I would mention parenthetically that while the text doesn't play with visual layout much, there are a few instances of words that seem chosen as much for their appearance as anything else. In the epigraph of chapter II, the last line is powerfully evocative of the Manhattan skyline - but the word millionwindowed is actually shaped like the skyline, full of tall narrow spires pushed close together. I am convinced that the author has done this deliberately.)

The content of the novel is as disjointed as the style. There is not one protagonist, but a dozen, some of whom never cross paths; not one plot, but scores of them, some with little or no connection between them. The storyline is a blur of impressions, eerily like a time-lapse camera trained on a single street corner over several decades - images pop out of the rushing crowd, faces, voices, some reappear, some don't.

In many ways Dos Passos seems to be trying to simulate a real city as closely as possible. His characters are neither heroes nor villains, but merely certain ordinary people who live in New York. His stories are neither more nor less than their everyday lives, and like real lives, do not necessarily have satisfying endings; at times the viewpoint seems almost arbitrary in where it stops focusing on a given person, for the moment or forever. Again, it is almost as though we readers are present in the city, and can only see the story of whoever we happen to run into; just as in the real world, one often doesn't get to hear the endings of people's life-stories.

Perhaps Dos Passos is implying that any story seen through the labyrinth of a city is perforce fragmented and incomplete. Or maybe that any life lived in a city is perforce fragmented and incomplete; how could we, as observers, tell the difference? We don't really know most of these people, and there are far too many of them for us to ever get to know them all - a very urban situation.

The one thing that all the characters have in common is that all of them experience the pressure of being surrounded by people, things, sounds, images, that are not connected to them - of being part of a montage. The connecting factor in their lives, and the theme that connects their stories, is (paradoxically) a universal disconnection.

The first and most profound kind of disconnection in this novel is that of families: parents from children, husbands from wives. The first image we see is a newborn baby squirming "like a knot of earthworms," in a basket held by a nurse "as if it were a bedpan" (p. 1), and it's immediately placed in a room with a lot of other babies. Subtext: In the city, from the moment of one's birth - and all too often, up to the moment of one's death - one is surrounded by unconnected strangers.

Most of the mothers in this story feel little or no connection to their children:

The recurring impression is that these mothers don't actually want to be mothers. Later in the book, Cassie and Ellen both develop unwanted pregnancies, and each expresses the feeling that the "thing" growing inside her is going to kill her.

Of course, none of the children are oblivious to this lack of connection:

The above fragments are all the more telling when one remembers that Ellen, the child in the first sequence, is the Mother in the second. It's also worth recalling the feelings of abandonment expressed by Ellen's own mother not long before: "I wish I'd die," she sobs to her husband in full view of her daughter. "You hate me both of you. If you didnt hate me you wouldnt leave me alone like this." (p.23) What conclusion is young Ellen supposed to draw, then, when both of her parents leave her alone? Again, we have an ironic sense of connection through detachment - those who feel that their loved ones have abandoned them are the most likely, in this book, to abandon others. A striking exception is Lily Herf, whose attachment to her son Jimmy verges on a dependency, and is related to his absent father: "You must learn to like hot things.... He always liked hot things." "Who mother?" "Someone I loved very much." (p.81) . Perhaps related to this, there is a curious sense that Jimmy is the only one who recognizes, not just that things in the city are wrong, but how things should be when they're right. I feel that Jimmy is the control character; the reader is meant to agree with his reactions. (There is little to prove that this is the case, but it cannot be an accident that the narrative stops as soon as Jimmy leaves the city.)

Spouses or lovers tend to be as disconnected from each other as parents and children. In talking about her significant other, Cassie protests naïvely that "...our love was so beautiful it could go on for years and years. I could love him for a lifetime without even kissing him." (p.166) One wonders how she can think of the relationship as love when neither one of them understands the other's desires and motivations, nor seems interested in understanding:

Ellen's lack of connection - fear of connection? - is perhaps the strongest of all the characters. She uses nicknames ("Jojo" for John Oglethorpe, "Jimps" for Jimmy Herf, et cetera) not as an intimacy, but to distance herself from the terrifying realness of another human being in her life. She changes her own name to distance herself from her own past - if "Ellen" has been made unhappy, "Elaine" can ignore it.

Disconnection from one's past is another recurring motif, particularly regarding the immigrant population. You come to New York City and whatever you were before is gone; you've entered civilization now, and about half of its natives will give you a little free advice on how you should act here. The other half will consider you fair game, for the butt of a joke if not an outright swindle; in a way, this also constitutes advice on how one behaves in the City.

In another irony, when people are desperately seeking a connection it eludes them, but the connection to one's past seems to hang on when people are trying hardest to get rid of it. The immigrants who come here to become Americans are unable to remove the taint of their origins:

And Bud, who has come to the city to escape the consequences of having murdered his abusive father (or guardian), finds that the act has followed him to the city; his fear sees a detective around every corner, and he winds up throwing himself off of the Brooklyn Bridge to escape the only way he can.

Finally, there is a running sense of disconnection from surroundings - which can be a necessary survival tactic: in a place where surroundings tend to be unrelated to you or to each other, you learn to how to ignore, or you build up some other defense.

Numbers, in this montage of a place, are the only things that can be depended upon to move in sequential, logical order. Running through the sensory overload of Dos Passos's word-city is a sense of the insupportability of it; nobody with any degree of sensitivity can handle it for very long. They die, or they go a little bit crazy to protect themselves from it all, or (if they're fortunate, implies the author) they leave.