A novel in the tradition of Naturalism, McTeague explores the internal and external forces that drive people’s behavior and dictate the outcomes of their decisions. From the beginning of the novel, people are described as creatures of routine who blindly follow daily rituals. From his window, McTeague watches the routine activity of Polk Street, which follows the same predictable patterns. McTeague himself follows a routine by watching this activity after eating in the coffee joint. Life on Polk Street, and life with the McTeagues, runs “monotonously in its accustomed grooves” (198).

Despite his temporary refinement during the early months of his marriage, McTeague cannot escape his nature, which is that of a miner. McTeague’s mother, “filled with the one idea of having her son rise in life and enter a profession,” sent McTeague off to train under a “charlatan” dentist (2); however, at the end of the novel, McTeague, “[s]traight as a homing pigeon, and following a blind and unreasoned instinct,” returns to the Big Dipper Mine, picking up “his life again exactly where he had left it the day when his mother had sent him away with the travelling dentist” (385). As he and Trina “sink rapidly lower and lower” (335), McTeague’s “instincts of the old-time miner” return (334), and he “laps[es] back to his early estate” (334).