Dangling Man, Bellow’s first novel, is written in a journal form. It is this very first novel that demonstrates the plight of modern man caught in miserable alienated situation. The adjective “dangling” in the title indicates a situation of helpless waiting, of ambiguous swaying, of an airy suspension between alienation and accommodation.
The novel opens during WWII with Joseph, a resident of Chicago for eighteen years, in a state of alienation and isolation. Owing to a snarl of red tape, the draft call he is expecting, simply fails to come. He has given up his job, moved to a lower middle-class rooming house, and is being supported by his wife. He has severed relationships with his friends and acquaintances because “the main bolt that held us together has given away”(9). He is patronized almost beyond restraint by his in-laws and by his brother Amos and his brother’s family. His wife, Iva, is visiting her mother and they no longer seem to have anything to say to each other. In the solitude of his room, with his “freedom” from the usual family and social obligations, Joseph experiences a sense of total alienation. He is lost in the deep sea of quietness. Since no one is with him, he has to invent a Spirit of Alternatives to talk to so that his ideas can have a sounding board. The fact accounts for the form of the novel as a Journal, the proper form for an isolate.
Through his retrospections, the reader gets information about his dilemma. He is not only alienated from society but also estranged from people around him and himself. Inasmuch as Dangling Man is set during the period in which Joseph awaits induction, the title evidently refers to his dangling between civilian life and the army; and the war is directly responsible for a drastic change in his life. In a sense, then, the novel is a war story about what can happen to a man when he is caught in the exigencies of a national military struggle. But the book is about Joseph and World War II only in much the same sense that Huckleberry Finn is a book about Buck and the antebellum South. The setting of Bellow’s work is indeed World War II, but that fact serves only as background for an experience that extends far beyond the confines of any time and certainly any war. Different and more substantial “strings” than those of the war are involved in Joseph’s “dangling”. His separation from his own society is as much personal as social.
The novel opens during WWII with Joseph, a resident of Chicago for eighteen years, in a state of alienation and isolation. Owing to a snarl of red tape, the draft call he is expecting, simply fails to come. He has given up his job, moved to a lower middle-class rooming house, and is being supported by his wife. He has severed relationships with his friends and acquaintances because “the main bolt that held us together has given away”(9). He is patronized almost beyond restraint by his in-laws and by his brother Amos and his brother’s family. His wife, Iva, is visiting her mother and they no longer seem to have anything to say to each other. In the solitude of his room, with his “freedom” from the usual family and social obligations, Joseph experiences a sense of total alienation. He is lost in the deep sea of quietness. Since no one is with him, he has to invent a Spirit of Alternatives to talk to so that his ideas can have a sounding board. The fact accounts for the form of the novel as a Journal, the proper form for an isolate.
Through his retrospections, the reader gets information about his dilemma. He is not only alienated from society but also estranged from people around him and himself. Inasmuch as Dangling Man is set during the period in which Joseph awaits induction, the title evidently refers to his dangling between civilian life and the army; and the war is directly responsible for a drastic change in his life. In a sense, then, the novel is a war story about what can happen to a man when he is caught in the exigencies of a national military struggle. But the book is about Joseph and World War II only in much the same sense that Huckleberry Finn is a book about Buck and the antebellum South. The setting of Bellow’s work is indeed World War II, but that fact serves only as background for an experience that extends far beyond the confines of any time and certainly any war. Different and more substantial “strings” than those of the war are involved in Joseph’s “dangling”. His separation from his own society is as much personal as social.
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