Didacticism in Frank Norris's McTeague Frank Norris McTeague's niche in American literature has been characterized time and time again as strictly naturalistic. The novel does well in this genre. It is, among other things, a scientific, representative and pessimistic study of ordinary people or the lower middle classes, which ultimately ends in tragedy. It is not the purpose of this essay to dispute these qualifications; rather question the genre itself. The scientific novel is impossible for a number of reasons. Practitioners of naturalism, including Norris, have attempted to create representative characters with inherited biological traits (traits over which they have no control), place these characters in a meticulously defined environment, and produce/predict the resulting behavior. The naturalistic novel is based on the assumption that this behavior is, indeed, predictable. This assumption is questionable to say the least. The scientific method, in its simplest form, essentially consists of four fundamental elements. According to an online encyclopedia, they are as follows:1. Characterization (quantification, observation and measurement)2. Hypothesis (an explanation of the characterization)3. Prediction (Logical deduction from hypothesis 4. Experiment (Testing all of the above) It is not the purpose of this essay to investigate whether Dreiser, Zola, London, or other naturalists successfully practiced these methods in the context of the novel. It is clear however, Norris did not he did. Mcteague can successfully incorporate the observational and explanatory elements of the scientific method as well as other nuances of the naturalistic genre; however, his study is useless without elements three and four the logical deduction from the hypothesis and the verification of the other elements to demonstrate coherence that are virtually impossible for a fiction writer to achieve. Character, setting, and almost always the look of a novel are not simple observations of the physical world but are created in the physical world of the author's subjective mind. It must be admitted, therefore, that naturalism, like most literary genres and movements, is neither definitive nor rational; at most it is an application of somewhat obscure scientific values ​​to narrative, and nothing more . If Norris's McTeague does not, therefore, produce a rational conclusion to hypotheses and experimentation in a scientific way, what is the function of the novel? A significant consideration (in attempting to answer this question) might be the adaptation of the novel into a silent film in 1924. : Greed. The title alone is significant. It's not the story of McTeague or even the story of San Francisco.