In conclusion, the juxtaposition of McTeague and Alita reveals a fascinating dialogue about the nature of humanity across the divide of modernism and postmodernism. Both works agree that the soul is a fragile fiction, that the environment is a cruel warden, and that the pursuit of “more” is a fatal poison. But while Norris’s naturalist tragedy accepts this with a cold, clinical despair, Alita: Battle Angel injects a fierce, humanist defiance. McTeague is the man who discovers he is an animal and dies; Alita is the woman who discovers she is a machine and fights. In the end, the essay’s thesis holds true: to understand the 19th-century fear of the beast within and the 21st-century fear of the machine without, one need look no further than the bloody hands of a dentist in Death Valley and the glowing eyes of a cyborg in Iron City. Both are us.
Yet, the essential divergence between the two works lies in their response to this deterministic trap. Norris’s McTeague offers no escape, only entropy. The novel ends in a stark, meaningless tableau of violence under a merciless sun. There is no justice, no redemption, only the fading howl of a canary. It is a purely pessimistic, Darwinian conclusion. Alita , conversely, channels the same raw material—the body-as-weapon, the brutal environment, the corrupt elite—into a narrative of revolutionary hope. Alita does not regress; she ascends. When she loses her loved ones or discovers her violent past, she does not surrender to nihilism. Instead, she embraces her identity as a warrior to challenge the system. Her final act is to point her Damascus blade at Zalem and declare war. Where McTeague is crushed by the weight of his biology, Alita reforges her biology into a rebellion. McTeague is the nightmare of determinism; Alita is the fantasy of agency within determinism. mcteague alita
It is an unlikely pairing separated by over a century of cinematic history: McTeague (1899), Frank Norris’s gritty naturalist novel of greed and violence in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, and Alita: Battle Angel (2019), Robert Rodriguez’s cyberpunk spectacle about a amnesiac cyborg in a brutal 26th-century scrapyard. On the surface, one is a study of dental drills and domestic decay, the other a whirlwind of Panzer Kunst and plasma bolts. Yet, a deeper literary and thematic analysis reveals a startling kinship. Both McTeague and Alita serve as profound explorations of the primal human condition when stripped of societal veneer. They are narratives about bodies as machines, the inescapable trap of environment, and the brutal, animalistic drive for power that lies just beneath the skin of civilization. In conclusion, the juxtaposition of McTeague and Alita
The most compelling parallel between the two works is their shared deterministic view of the body. Norris, a proponent of French Naturalism, presents the human body as a biological machine governed by hereditary and primal urges. McTeague, the hulking, ox-like dentist, is ruled by his appetites: “It was his instinct... He was merely a brute.” His physical strength is his only currency, and when his environment collapses, he regresses to a cave-dwelling animal. Similarly, Alita literalizes this metaphor. Alita’s body is not born but built; she is a “cyborg,” a machine of “berserker” components designed for combat. Her “heart” is a cold-fusion reactor, and her identity is encoded in her DNA-like “panzer soul.” Where McTeague discovers he is a beast, Alita discovers she is a weapon. Both protagonists confront the horrifying truth that the self is not a spiritual essence but a predetermined, material engine. McTeague’s brutal murder of his wife, Trina, in the desolation of Death Valley is the logical conclusion of his animal nature, just as Alita’s systematic dismantling of her enemies in the Kansas Bar brawl is the logical conclusion of her combat programming. McTeague is the man who discovers he is