Friday, February 19, 2010

Alienation in Dangling Man 2

As a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and an amateur writer studying eighteenth century figures. Joseph is unable to continue his writing, feeling that the ideas of the eighteenth century cannot answer his questions. He reads the newspaper, goes for walk, tries to lead a life of reason and disciplined feeling. But in the social vacuum, he finds himself rootless, a failure.
One reason is that society does not accept him, as it rejects artists and intellectuals generally. Since these people do not perform in their narrowest sense, essential and productive functions, they have no status in the eyes of the respectable and productive members of the community. Or rather they have the status of children, tolerated and patronized by their elders who know a great deal more about the bread and butter problems of life. In his essay, Distraction of a Fiction Writer, published in 1957, Bellow asserts that society does not honor the imagination, which is so important to the writer. The writer feels, then, that society does not need him. The writer lives in a world where a man’s work is supposed to be in the practical realm of things. Not being practical, the writer is held in contempt. In the novel Joseph’s brother and his family document the antagonism of the middle class to those who, outside it, are searching for freedom and identity. Amos has contempt for his ineffectual brother.
Another aspect of the alienation motif is caused by the specific situations Joseph is waiting for his draft call when he will find a place in the army, and it is the notice not to arrive after he has cut his civilian connections that leaves him dangling and drifting aimlessly. Being jobless robs Joseph of a place. He has no sense of belonging to the community of man. For Joseph, the notion of community is breaking down. As it goes, he begins to lose feeling for the people around him, to lose touch with the magnetic chain of humanity. He feels himself imprisoned in one room: “I, in this room, separate, alienated, distrustful, find in my purpose not an open world, but a closed, hopeless jail. My perspectives end in the walls” (75). In this situation action seeps away. The hero devotes himself to the niceties of routine. He rises early, buys his cigars, drinks a Coca-Cola, and is down in the lobby by eight o’clock. Dangling between civilian life and the army, isolated from others, Joseph wonders who he is. He “suffers from a feeling of strangeness, of not quite belonging to the world, of lying under a cloud and looking up at it”(24). No longer “the sort of person I had been,” Joseph looks at himself, stands back and examines himself through the occasional use of the third person descriptions: “Joseph, aged twenty-seven, an employee of the Inter-American Travel Bureau, a tall, already slightly flabby but, nevertheless, handsome young man, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin....”(21). What is the strange object “Joseph”? “Only for legal purpose”, he says, is he his older self.

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