Thursday, March 4, 2010

Alienation in Seize the Day 1

Again, one of the major themes of Seize the Day, is the isolation of human spirit in modern society. This time, Bellow projects his theme more powerfully, yet in a quite different way. The short story recounts a day in the life of a failing middle-aged American, Tommy Wilhelm, who has cut off from his wife and his children, and has made a series of poor decisions that land him jobless in his early forties at the Hotel Ansonia where his father lives in retirement. Bellow begins the novella with Tommy emerging from his room, assuming a bold front. He gives over the first three sections to Tommy’s past and his breakfast with his father, and the second three to his relations with Tamkin who promises to cure all of Tommy’s troubles. In the last climactic section, Tommy’s father denies him and Dr. Tamkin, having lost Tommy’s remaining savings, disappears.
Like Joseph, Tommy has lost his job with the Projax Company and dangles aimlessly. Unlike Joseph whose dangling is directly caused by specific situation, Tommy is a schlemiel, good for nothing. His alienation is mainly due to his self-centered character. He is a taker. He allows his wife Margaret to place burden upon burden on him, when he knows that “no court would have awarded her the amounts he paid” (29). He chooses to live with a cold reasonable father in a hotel for retired people. He chooses out of pride, to leave the company where he had been employed and does not look for other work. Throughout his life Tommy has made bad decisions he knew in advance to be bad. “He had decided that it would be a bad mistake to go to Hollywood, and then he went” with Maurice Venice (23) a talent Scout. Paying no attention to the work-hard advice of his father, he gives Tamkin, who is a swindler, his last $700, hoping to get rich quick with no effort. And he does not accidentally give Tamkin his money. “From the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money” (58).
Like Joseph and Herzog, Tommy is separated from the world.   He is not a good husband. His wife has been separated from him for a long time. He does not work well enough to keep his job. His father has rejected him as a slob. He has no friends and he does not trust his one acquaintance Tamkin, while he feels that his children’s affections have been poisoned against him. He is bitter, weighted down by grief, living on self-pity and pills. Alienated from himself, accepting the world’s values and rejecting himself, he sees himself as a swine, an elephant, a hippopotamus. What he sees is a cold alien world which reflects his own isolations:
And was everybody crazy here? What sort of people did you see?   Every other man spoke a language entirely his own … You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood, not to know the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the sick from the well. The fathers were no fathers and the sons no sons. You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to in a city like New York? (83-84)
Living in the Hotel Ansonia with the people waiting to die, Tommy constantly feels pains in the chest, or choking, or suffocating, as he shows his father by strangling himself and telling him, “Dad, I just can’t breathe.   My chest is all up — I feel choked” (109).
In Seize the Day, Bellow is concerned with the well-worn   dilemma of the individual desperately isolated and profoundly alone, caused by aggression of society and the shortcomings of his own character, as the story opens, Tommy finds himself in debt to his wife and the Hotel. Forty-three years old, huge, bearlike, over-emotional, and heavily dependent, he is caught in a world devoid of heart. In this world, there is no caring and no real communication among men. People talk to each other, do businesses, pass the time of day, but somehow do so only superficially; the human heart is never reached; masks and deceptions are the rule. There is no compassion, no understanding, and no love.  Tommy is nakedly and miserably alone since he has lost his job and has no sense of belonging to the community of man.

2 comments:

  1. Q. Discuss the theme of Alienation in Saul Bellow’s 'Seize the Day'.

    Ans: Alienation or sense of separation is one of the dominating themes in Bellow’s novel Seize the Day. Saul Bellow is primarily concerned with the well-worn modern dilemma of the individual: Read the full answer at http://josbd.com/seize_the_day_2.html

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  2. Q. Discuss the theme of Alienation in Saul Bellow’s 'Seize the Day'.

    Ans: Alienation or sense of separation is one of the dominating themes in Bellow’s novel Seize the Day. Saul Bellow is primarily concerned with the well-worn modern dilemma of the individual: Read the full answer at www.josbd.com/seize_the_day_2.html

    ReplyDelete