Aharoni sees the novel as a discussion of the twin questions "How much freedom do we really have?" and "What should we do with it?" Discusses the deteriorating effects of freedom on Joseph and his ultimate ability to understand not only his own freedom but that of others.

Anderson discusses the room, the city, and the war as the three dimensions of Joseph's experience that provide both the background and metaphor for what is at once freedom from an identity and enslavement by the search for it.

Argues that DM is a city novel, but not a novel of a city; a novel set in Chicago but not of Chicago; a war novel, but not a novel about war. It is a novel about apparent choices when in reality there are none; as well as a novel about a young man who seeks isolation then absorption into uniform of the times, knowing he will ultimately accept the fact of his victimization because a separate peace is impossible. Concludes that Bellow ends not with philosophical inquiry, but with the kind of traditional American optimism of an early Whitman or Sherwood Anderson.

Sees Bellow as neither an intellectual nor a Jewish humanistic writer, but a mystical one who constantly encourages his heroes to escape history and "break the spirit's sleep" by refusing to see the Self as merely the product of its own historical past. In DM the hero finally rejects intellect and static definitions of the past as sole definitions of self. Joseph see-saws between reason and nihilism and finally experiences illumination through an intuitive experience that only comes when intellectual responses become impossible.

Discusses how in the earlier European tradition hero and anti-hero reflected two diametrically opposed stances toward reality while engaging in some dialectics and exchange of attitudes. Relates the modern hero to this tradition and argues that these semi-polar attitudes are often found within the same character in modern fiction. Goes on to compare both of these trends in DM through an illustration of the similarities between DM and Diderot's Rameau's Nephew.

Considers Joseph of DM as an all-American adolescent dangling between action and inaction, acceptance of tradition and denial of tradition, participation and isolation, love and hate, and his old self and his emerging self. Bellow chooses the journal form for his narrative and includes experimental dialogue in order to dramatize the inner struggles of his protagonist. Unfortunately, Bellow is so possessed by ideas that they take over the novel. But he does succeed in universalizing the character.

Donoghue argues that the Dangling Man is not an outsider or stranger, but a man in an interim situation in which action is merely motion drained of meaning. Such a man is a worthier image of our condition than the outsider because he is an exceptional man able to throw light upon our interim condition precisely because he develops a spirit of opposition in face of false simplifications, thus realizing his total responsibility in a palpable world. The quest is the search for the strength to overcome the fear of choice, and avoid public institutions whose claims are hostile to the imagination and to individual autonomy.

Begins with Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and suggests that most Bellow critics have not seen any need to establish this racial coordinate as they examined his works. Proceeds to examine the Africanist presence and personae in DM. Despite the presence of only two mentioned "negroes," taken together they indicate a text in which not a single African American labeled as such utters a word. Furthermore, a hierarchy is set up in which white males are always positioned higher than African Americans, thus serving as a basis for a representation of a social formation within which the definition of an American as "new, white and male" (Morrison, 43), was constituted.

Reads DM through the national regimentation and centering of values that occurred after WWII, and through Toni Morrison's theoretical paradigms in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Focuses on the ways in which the narrator, Joseph, disconcertingly fails to define ethnic and racial issues and thus inevitably cannot explore how issues of race and ethnicity might relate to his constant concerns over class identity. Thus, DM becomes a complex exploration of these relationships inside of an evasive critical white reading, one replicating Joseph's own evasiveness in a disturbing homology. Discusses Joseph's encounter with blackness, the social and sexual parameters which emmesh him, and the dyadic structures of desire which drive his imagination. Joseph's story makes clear strategic use of black characters to define and enhance the white characters. Provides a social history of segregated housing race riots and bombing campaigns in Chicagoan history. Points up the restrictive housing covenants which segregate white and black Chicagoans and Joseph's falls in fortune which place him closer to his black ghetto neighbors. Invokes the parallels provided by Invisible Man since both IM and DM finally hinge on issues of self-knowledge. Joseph's ethnicity-free self-designation is what is at issue and makes him even more unreliable as a narrator. Evasiveness and slippage concerning racial and class identity causes his contempt for blackness and his stereotyping to increase. Expresses disappointment at Bellow's subdued treatment of Joseph and prepares the reader for the much more disturbing construction of race to be found in HRK. Joseph's final vulnerability causes him to deny that he is a negro.

Bellow's novels deny the post-modernist strain of aversion to representational modes of narrative and self-reflexibility. Yet Bellow does explore new mental versions of reality as he attempts to relocate modern man. While not a realist in the Dreiserian sense, he is as subversive as any post-modern writer. He is an explorer in the field of human reality. In DM Bellow shows Joseph recoiling from the idea of an objective reality subscribed to by collective assent.

Discusses Joseph's repudiation of hard-boiledness and elaborates on its many levels of meanings as well as how this code has developed. Describes Joseph's search for an alternative set of values with which to confront his modern age.

Argues that modern man has no exterior voice such as a gleeman or scop. The modern anti-hero has only his own voice, which is not intended for public oral presentation but for private reading. This ancient and yet modern voice has been achieved through the journal voice in DM and functions to underscore his sung epic as he develops a modern version of the Odyssean myth in the novel.

Argues that DM has been undervalued. Discusses in depth the artistic implications of the journal form. The seemingly fragmented diary-form is the product of an artistry conscious of its aims, according to Kulshrestha, who goes on to point up the aesthetic and point-of-view ironies possible through such sophisticated and deliberate use of the form. Provides some alternate conclusions on the nature of Joseph's quest and discovery.

Outlines the affinity of spirit that exists between the French existentialists and the contemporary American novelist whose hero is engaged in the same existential quest for identity. Compares DM with Sartre's Nausea and Camus's The Stranger. Joseph is compared to Roquentin and Meursault. Develops an elaborate and scholarly discussion on the existentialist issues of freedom and death both central to DM.

Provides a re-evaluation of DM, recapitulating many earlier observations concerning sources and influences on the novel. Argues that DM is not simply an updating of Dostoevsky, nor merely an illumination of the American 1940s moral dilemma. It is an elaborate working out of the many stages, kinds, and degrees of alienation. All minor characters represent unacceptable alternatives to alienation. All of the positive themes of the later novels are prefigured in this novel. Although this is Bellow's first novel, it nevertheless exhibits his "inherited intellectual and emotional starting point" and his "dialectical roots." Such beginnings include: the divided self, existential freedom, Dostoevskian alienation, accommodation, contemporary conditions, childhood remembrances of poverty, and assertions of the basic goodness of life.

Examines Bellow's responses to the classical conception of the city. Traces characterizations of the urban milieu from DM to DD. Sums up Bellow's evolving sense of the city as uncertain, querulous, censoriousness, befuddled in its superiority, and hopelessly vandalized. Concludes that his reading of the city has become very dim indeed.

Asserts that previous criticism fails to confront the serious formal experimentation that takes place in DM. Claims it is best understood through the concept of "lyrical fiction." Such a point of view resolves the problem of the author/narrator relationship because the lyrical point of the journal mode becomes at once author, hero and audience. External actions, characters and settings are simply absorbed into the lyrical pattern. The rhythms of the plot are governed by the logic of lyric association, even when the associations become disjunctive.

In a brief discussion of Whitman's and Emerson's democratic hero, discusses nineteenth-century vitalist texts, early sport rituals, and the other shift in American fiction to the "spectator-observer" protagonist. Claims that the central text which validates the witness as hero in relation to sports culture is Bellow's DM, which immediately engages concepts of modern American heroism. Suggests that Bellow's manifesto contains the seeds of a new way to approach athletic heroism through the eyes of the witness who does not compete or play, but who freely expresses vulnerability. Argues that Bellow is attacking both Hemingway's code hero and his stoic acceptance of pain and danger, thus correctly identifying the inarticulate, physically dominant reality of the athlete, even though Bellow's major interest is in the frustrated witness as a kind of closet-performance artist, shaping small rituals that he ruefully understands as his own repetitive games of defeat. Invokes a Derridean model by suggesting that the witness has only his own language and must invoke the essence of language play. Thus the witness moves to supplement the theatricality of gesture with that of language, binding himself to undertake the hero's quest.

Argues that the Holocaust provides the occasion and the major structural principle of the DM, particularly in relation to its use of the "double" and the double plot. Suggests that Bellow's sense of having gotten away with tuberculosis as a child has left him with a residual survivor guilt which he then expresses through Leventhals' guilt at having survived the Depression. Documents Bellow's explanation that until the fall of France he had completely misunderstood the war because of his orientation as a Trotskyite Marxist who did not believe that a worker's state would wage and imperialist war. Allbee expresses the repressed side of Leventhal's own mind. Leventhal's repressed subconscious is mysteriously prompted into existence at the precise moment of the child Mickey's death. Describes the sea of faces in the crowd mentioned in the novel's epigraph as clearly reminiscent of the holocaust victims, a pattern enacted in many of his other novels, and in such works as Morrison's Beloved, and Erdrich's Tracks where storytelling becomes a survival mechanism. Provides a sophisticated psychosocial explanation of the literary phenomenon of doubling via Otto Rank, Sigmund Freud and drama theory.

Notes in considerable detail the similarities between Joseph and Rameau's nephew. Illustrates how Diderot's Rameau's Nephew may have provided structural and philosophical models for the development of DM.

Looks at the metaphor of recovery in DM, a wartime text, viewed in light of the newspaper rhetoric of American recovery from the condition of war that dominated the press in 1944. Suggests that Bellow's notion of Joseph's recovery as a sick patient is a response to the current condition of the country as put forth in FDR's most famous presidential address of that year describing wartime USA as a sick patient. Points out that in contrast to newspaper headlines talking of almost nothing but action, DM features a series of anticlimaxes and inactions, and very little plot or conflict because nothing ever really happens. There is little sense of danger in Joseph's somewhat unpatriotic, bell jar world where combat and war is almost totally ignored. Yet despite this a wartime critic for The New York Times sees it as a story where danger lurks, conflict abounds, and Joseph is trapped without freedom. Concludes that there is also a dim subtext in which the text never happened at all. Concludes that this subtext also describes Joseph as a patient, but one recovering from wartime inaction rather than action.

While DM is in many ways noticeably European in style, its ending is definitely that of the contemporary American novel. The novel depicts the paradigm of Joseph's generation's conflict between; 1930's ideology and 1940's pragmatism as a metaphor for radical displacement. Saposnik attempts to portray the intellectual world in which Bellow was an active participant during the period dealt with in the novel.

Commends Bellow for being the first to seize and record the experience of the WW II generation who have witnessed the depression and the New Deal. There is much that is familiar and recognizable in the settings, relationships, non-essential marriage and family life. Yet Joseph's uniqueness lies in his refusal to yield to the organized lack of imagination that has produced the life of the times. Criticizes the book for using the journal form and missing many dramatic possibilities that would relieve the linearity of the plot.

Treats DM alongside Under a Glass Bell. Sees DM as an excellent account of the non-combatant in wartime, and a remarkably honest piece of testimony on the psychology of a whole generation. Compares the novel to many others of its type that feature disillusioned communists and dangling heroes. Depicts the refusal of the hero to defend the status quo, his insistence on meeting the challenge of fascism and his frustrated artistic and intellectual impulses.

Considers DM to be the turning point in American cultural history where Bellow throws down the gauntlet to Hemingway. Argues that Bellow is the new spokesman for an altered America that would be more like Cohn than Jake Barnes. Joseph hangs suspended between induction and isolation while being attended by his dybbuk. The Spirit of Alternatives. Joseph is a departure from the European Schlemiel because eof his existentialist intensity.

Calls DM small in size and large in conception. In this novel Bellow has taken on the plight of a whole generation of dangling men. Details the plight of the generations of artists who came of age in the 1930s and lost a belief in art while they gained a belief in alienation. This was Joseph's patrimony. He probes himself acutely for the paradox of his generation. Describes Bellow's style as restrained and scrupulous.