Submitted by wiz28ultra t3_10qe63s in books
To me, the Great American Novel doesn't really exist in a literal sense; however, I do think it's an interesting conversation topic to bring up because each of us has a unique definition for the GAN.
To me, Moby Dick is the closest candidate to being the Great American Novel, partially because it's so re-readable and I think holds a special place in our literature for not just being a work of prose that can be compared to say the Divine Comedy or Hamlet IMO , but also producing an encyclopedic narrative around a diverse cast of characters representative of the backgrounds of many an American.
Compared to say, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, or The Grapes of Wrath, I personally feel that the book has that fantastical narrative and nature as a narrative epic that makes it a better candidate for being the GAN than those other works.
As a reader, for me, the closest novels that come to being comparable to Moby Dick are Blood Meridian and Gravity's Rainbow,
EDIT: Blood Meridian for not just being some of the most beautiful prose I've read by an American author outside of Melville and Pynchon, but also because of how it frames its narrative around the violence committed in the early days of US expansion.
EDIT 2: Gravity's Rainbow for also having equally beautiful prose, but also for being so all-encompassing in its grand narrative surrounding the American government and the corporations birthed inside its borders as having a true monopoly on violence in the second half of the 20th Century and into the 21st.