The pervasiveness of alcohol in John Dos Passos’s major works, Manhattan Transfer and USA, has been widely noticed. Yet abstinence, the opposite, is just as conspicuous. The article explores the dialectical implications of drink vs. abstinence, which—together with considerations of the cultural history and contemporaneous political issues connected with alcohol—reveal that drink plays an intricate role in Dos Passos’s socio-political critique. While drink symbolizes human life with all its complexities and contradictions, its opposite, abstinence, exemplifies the inhumaneness of a reduced world view that prioritizes the instrumental logic of capitalism and demands unquestioning subjugation to the given conditions.
