Although Frank Norris's first two novels have been valued both for their intrinsic worth and for their importance in the history of American naturalism, they have also been severely criticized for their inconsistencies. Summarized broadly, these charges are, first, that there is a lack of consistency between Norris's dramatization of a deterministic system in McTeague and his frequent avowals of individual moral responsibility in Vandover. Second, that there are inconsistencies within the novels themselves— that Norris appears to free McTeague from responsibility for his behavior and yet adopts a moral tone when discussing McTeague's sexual desires, and that though Norris for the most part blames Vandover for his choice of an evil life, he also seems to indicate in several passages that Vandover is the victim of irresistible larger forces. These are serious strictures, for they undermine both the validity of each of the works as artistic wholes and the stature of Norris as a serious artist— that is, as a writer of integrity drawing upon a coherent system of ideas. The charges arise, I believe, from several basic deficiencies in the criticism of the two novels. First, though critics of Norris's work correctly emphasize his heavy debt to Zola for specific plots, scenes and characters, as well as for larger qualities of scope and method, they have too often attempted to interpret Norris as a philosophical naturalist. Seen from the point of view of Zola's professed theories, Norris is an inconsistent writer, his work failing to maintain a standard of materialistic determinism. It has not been sufficiently realized that Norris conceived of naturalism primarily as a literary method embracing subject matter, narrative technique and characterization rather than as a body of belief concerning the nature of man and his world. Norris is indeed an inconsistent naturalist, since he is not a naturalist in the philosophical sense of that term. The second basis of misinterpreting the two novels stems from the first. Confined to a search for naturalistic elements, critics have neglected the possibility that another system of ideas might be present in the two works. Lastly, though both novels deal with particular psychological and physiological abnormalities, there has been no study of contemporary beliefs concerning such abnormalities and the relationship of these beliefs to the themes of the novels. In this paper, therefore, I will bypass the usual stumbling block of Norris as a naturalist.