Hey Rub-a-dub-dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life — Reading Companion

From Personal Vantage to Cosmic Scale

The opening pages establish a voice that is both intimate and sweeping. The narrator describes his surroundings with sensory detail—the church masses, the votive candles—but quickly moves to larger questions about God, nature, and social arrangements. This shift from the particular to the universal is a key structural pattern. Dreiser does not linger in the personal; instead, he uses the Jersey City setting as a springboard into mechanistic philosophy. The reader should note how the concrete details (the lumberyard, the tower) serve as anchors for abstract arguments, a technique that recurs throughout the collection.

Mechanistic Nature and the Limits of Morality

In the later excerpt, Dreiser invokes the investigations of "mechanists and the monists"—citing Loeb, Crile, and Snyder—to challenge conventional morality. He argues that nature creates by the billions and allows entire races to disappear, questioning whether a Creator cares about individual excess or strain. The language is blunt: "What is one man, one organism, one race of organisms, to a thing that produces them by quintillions?" This passage reveals Dreiser's reliance on contemporary scientific discourse to undermine religious and ethical certainties. The reader should watch for how he deploys such references not as proof but as rhetorical weapons against dogmatic moralism.

Impulse, Control, and the Warring Self

Dreiser develops a view of human beings as compounds of chemic tendencies, whose impulses are provided by a Creator but cannot always be controlled. He writes that "only the warring, frustrating impulses of other compounds (or individuals or forces, social opinion being a phase of them)" impose restraint. This mechanistic determinism is tempered by a recognition of change: "Nature may be constructing individuals and forces which will completely undo, or at least enlarge, our theories of individual limitations." The reader should note how Dreiser balances a bleak determinism with a tentative openness to transformation, a tension that may shape the book's later essays.

The Recurring Motif of Balance and Equation

A key term in the later excerpt is "equation" or "balance." Dreiser posits a "conditioning law of equation" that compels reciprocity between parts, yet he insists that what we consider necessary for balance may be trivial to nature. He uses war as an example of nature sweeping away minor arrangements to restore a changeful balance. This concept appears repeatedly: in the opening chapter's contrast between the narrator's poverty and the Woolworth Building, and in the philosophical sections where individual limitations are set against cosmic forces. The reader should track how "equation" functions as both a scientific metaphor and a structural principle across the essays.

The Role of the First-Person Frame

The decision to open with a first-person narrator named John Paradiso—who is not Dreiser—creates a curious distance. The narrator is a character, a device that allows Dreiser to speak personally without claiming autobiography. The reader should consider how this framing affects the authority of the arguments. Is the narrator a stand-in for Dreiser, or a persona whose views may be tested? The later excerpts abandon this frame entirely, shifting to a more direct authorial voice. This inconsistency may be intentional, inviting the reader to question the relationship between the speaker and the ideas presented.

As you read, attend to the interplay between the concrete and the abstract. Dreiser's essays are not systematic treatises but exploratory meditations, often circling back to the same obsessions: the indifference of nature, the fragility of moral codes, the power of impulse. The opening chapter's setting—a room with a view of a tower—is a microcosm of the book's method: a fixed point from which to contemplate the vast and the terrifying. Let the contradictions stand; they are the point.

I found myself thinking of Dreiser’s restless night in Jersey City, how he watched the Woolworth glow and couldn’t quite believe in his own conclusions, even as he wrote them down. It felt like old Hazlitt, that same stubborn wrestling with an idea until it turns personal. The The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 01 (of 12) — A Closer Reading has that same ache—a voice trying to think aloud, not for an audience, but just to see what happens.