On the other hand, Joseph is a man who defends human nobility and affirms the possibility of human mutual communication. He yearns to love and to have faith in men, tout his pride leads him to scorn men and hate himself. Believing in reason, in man’s potential beauty, Joseph is a humanist, a desperate one. He looks at Chicago and sees slums. He looks at “the lack of the human in the all-too-human”(127), and the bleak despair he feels makes him ask, “where was there a particle of what, elsewhere, or in the past, had spoken in man’s favor?”(20). Though realizing that “his humanism, is not viable in Chicago, he tries throughout the novel to sustain it” (SBDM, 25). He looks for signs of men’s common humanity. He does so because “I was involved with them” (25). Thus he defends traditional humanistic values — individuality, morel integrity, brotherhoods the individual and humanity, joined by love. Once he writes about himself, “He is a person greatly concerned with keeping; intact and free from encumbrance a sense of his own being, its importance” (22). He wants to preserve the self, its dignity and freedom. Therefore Joseph is unable to end his alienation, although he wants to. His reconciliation with his wife and society is not permanent until he finally gives up selfhood. Once again, “goodness is achieved not in the vacuum, but in the company of other men, amended by love” (75). If Joseph cannot be part of society as a whale, can he at least be part of a “colony of the spirit, or a group whose covenants forbade spite, bloodiness, and cruelty” (32)? He does not find such a colony because it is not in him to find it, but he longs for it, as surely Bellow does. This is the state of man, dangling to or fro, between participation and withdraw. Joseph represents a good example of Bellow’s desperate affirmation — his longing to affirm, but his inability to do so fully. His accommodation to society is only temporary since the army is not his lifelong home. After he leaves the army, where will he find his place?
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