Seize the Day

Considers the refusal of the father to relinquish his role in favor of sacrificial love to be the central perversion dealt with in SD. Tommy Wilhelm is the sign of the failure of the psychocenter of the family unit as the psychologically crippled son who seeks escape in surrogate fathers. Provides a detailed treatment of SD from a Freudian perspective, which concludes that Tommy finally intuits his own oedipal tragedy. The neurotic Tommy's wished-for father is clearly the dead father who he embraces as a delusion.

Calls the film version of SD a 90 minute cinematic tour de force of Tommy Wilhelm's unrelenting succession of painful, nightmarish events, which ends his final outcry against this fate. Notes that this outcry is frozen into the silence of a self-inflated imprisonment where the human soul is tossed around endlessly between death and loss. Provides an inset general essay on Bellow's attitude toward film and film versions of his novels. Concentrates finally on the actual production of the film, its artistic conventions and options, the narrative strategies of film and novella, the controversial ending, and the aesthetics of impermanence that permeate it.

Reviews the novel briefly and develops the view that it culminates a line of development begun with DM. Traces the ideational development across the four novels and concludes that SD constitutes a major coup.

Argues that Tamkin is not a plain hypocrite, or a mere problem in SD, but rather an ineffectual financial advisor and the kind of hypocrite who does not practice the healing philosophy he teaches. Sees Tommy Wilhelm not so much a victim of Tamkin's devious ways, but rather as a weak, self-compassionate, middle-aged man who undergoes an astonishing metamorphosis which makes him better prepared to face outside reality and his inner self. Describes Tamkin's mythic ancestry and concludes that Bellow seems to be telling us that whoever places trust in myths and storytelling is bound to find himself trapped, cheated, enriched, and simultaneously saved from the drabness of an orderly existence.

Traces the direct influence of West's Miss Lonely Hearts and Day of the Locust on SD. Detailed and convincing.

Bordewyk, Gordon. "Saul Bellow's Death of a Salesman." Saul Bellow Newsletter 1.1 (1981): 18–21.

Argues that Bellow relies heavily on Miller's plays for the themes and characters of SD. Traces similarities in names, occupational fortunes, problems with insurance companies, similar post-war backdrops, alienation of the middle-class, family break-down, a strong pastoral nostalgia, urban misery, and other shared material between the two playwrights.

Bouson, J. Brooks. "Empathy and Self-Validation in Bellow's Seize the Day." The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of Self. Ed. J. Brooks Bouson. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1989.64–81.

Argues that, like Dostoevsky's anti-hero and Kafka's insect-hero, Wilhelm Adler of SD craves the attention of others to support his threatened self. But unlike the others, Adler openly voices his sense of narcissistic entitlement and his desire for rescue. Claims that all his verbal pleas for sympathy shed light on his preverbal personality, a personality which masks ambivalence, anger, and disconnection. Concludes that his self is empty and full of dread. Sees Wilhelm as inhabiting not the glorious here-and-now fantasied by Tamkin, but the bleak here-and-now of his own crippled self.

Bouson, J. Brooks. "The Narcissistic Self-Drama of Wilhelm Adler: A Kohutian Reading of Bellow's Seize the Day." Saul Bellow Journal 5.2 (1986): 3–14. Rpt. in rev. version "Empathy and Self-valuation in Bellow's Seize the Day." The Emphatic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of Self. J. Brooks Bouson. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1989. 64–81.

Bellow, through his character Wilhelm Adler, anticipates recent psychoanalytic investigations into the dynamics of the narcissistic personality disorder. Wilhelm Adler provides an artistic anticipation of what psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut describes as "tragic," "broken" man, the narcissistically defective individual "who suffers from an enfeebled, crumbling sense of self."

Complains that SD is the third in the "mopery series" and is of interest as morbid social pathology insofar as it deals with the surface of a current American phenomenon: the middle-age adolescent. The ending of the novel is pure self-pity of the most saccharine order. There is no turning outward to humanity. This is not literature; it is a tour de force based on subject matter dear to the urban book reviewer.

SD is a novel in which the protagonist is a victim hero who, whether guilty or innocent, has a responsibility for his own alienation and victimization in an ambiguous Kafkaesque manner. Traces the Kafkaesque elements by pointing out the self-destruction of the character involving Wilhem's conflict with his father, with a larger system of authority, and a host of other similarities. Notes that the final Kafkaesque twist to the Oedipal conflict is Wilhelm's acceptance of his father's condemnation with perfect filial submission. Concludes that this is a black comedy of an alienated average man whose world is absurd as that of Kafka's protagonists, whose tendency leans toward hyperbole rather than restraint, whose self pity is so constantly before the reader that the reader develops no pity of his own. In SD, as in Kafka's stories which it most closely resembles, the decline or disintegration of an individual is not imposed from without, but results from the protagonist's acquiescence and participation in his own destruction.

Argues that SD is a novel in which Judaism itself is laid to rest. At the center of the text lies a dark and despairing consciousness of life in the modern world as a fact of the Nazi Holocaust. SD is largely about the Holocaust, but treats it in an oblique and understated way. It works like counter-scripture in which Bellow provides a new post-Holocaust testament, replacing both the Old and the New Testaments. It is a yizkor for the six million, and for the death of civilization. The final scene in the funeral parlor is not only for the world's lost Jews, but for the world itself. The kaddish is also for the loss of the father of Christianity, Judaism itself. Here Bellow provides a full measure of contempt for European and American culture. Hence SD unfolds as something of an allegory of prewar and postwar Europe. However, it's notions of the real soul and the pretender soul also suggest that Emersonian romantic American models of Self are not immune to the diseases of European and Jewish culture. Bellow takes the Jews complicity in their own victimization. a step further. He critiques the religious impulse in Judaism, Christianity, and Emersonianism to imagine souls in the first place, since such imagining is dangerous to humanity. What Bellow calls for is the unwriting of all scriptures, the eradication of the world as we know it, the dismantling of the Western theological and philosophical tradition, and the self-restraint not to indulge in their re-writing. Tommy's final scene in the funeral home is Bellow's de-creation of the world through the de-creation of the Self–a veritable great flood preparatory to the development of an entirely new world. Hence atonement is now an undefined moment in the future, a private and personal day of reckoning unbound by Christianity, Judaism, or Humanism.

Bullock, Chris. "Men and Depression: Saul Bellow's Seize the Day." Journal of Men's Studies 4.2 (1995): 153–68.

Suggests that SD is a study of the mental and behavioral conditions of depression, and, specifically of male depression. Discusses three theories of depression around three successive settings in SD. Covers these genderless theories of depression centering on the father's hotel, the brokerage office, and the chapel. Then approaches the novel from a mythopoetic and gendered reading of depression using Bly, Hillman, and Meade's work. Concludes that SD is about men's depression in particular, and that mythopoetic analysis is the most illuminating of the two methods.

Chametzky, Jules. "Death and the Post-Modern Hero/Schlemiel: An Essay on Seize the Day." New Essays on Seize the Day. Ed. Michael P. Kramer. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1998. 111–23.

Argues that SD is a brilliantly written account of the WWII explosion of violence and madness which abruptly ends modernity and ushers in the contingency and flux of postmodernity. Claims that this is a death-haunted Holocaust-inflected book in which normal is der Tod. Here Bellow seems to exist between option and realities making demands on him, in some kind of liminal state. Among other things it is also a story about the end of patriarchy as well as about other belief systems. Here fathers are no fathers and sons no sons. Details how Bellow and his peers lived through the dashed hopes of Socialism, Stalin's betrayals and brutalities, the Ukraine Massacres, the Purge Trials, Trotsky's assassination, the killing of the Jewish writers and intellectuals, the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, Fascism, WWII, the Atomic Bomb, the Holocaust, and the Hungarian Uprising. Concludes that all of this violence affirms to Tommy Wilhelm that there is only the death of the Self, a culture in tatters, and an ungraspable future. Tommy has no choice but to weep and live on one day after another.

Demonstrates Bellow's primary concerns in SD by discussing his examination of the earliest draft of the book entitled One of Those Days. A technical, detailed and essential article since it is the only study of the early manuscript and its relationship to the published novel. Deals primarily with the evolution of the characters and particularly that of Tommy Wilhelm.

Demonstrates that the early manuscript copy of the novel entitled One of Those Days contains the specific notions of character-armoring as elucidated originally by Wilhelm Reich in his book Character Analysis on this topic. Goes on to add to the previous discussions of this by Eusebio Rodrigues and John J. Clayton.

Concentrates on the puzzling last sentence of SD, which Chavkin claims has all the compression, intensity, and suggestiveness of romantic poetry, and therefore seeks to illuminate its meaning through comparison with Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality... ," Keats's "Ode to Sorrow," and other work of the early Romantics. Discusses Bellow's textual revisions of SD to centralize the idea of suffering, and argues that for Bellow romantic acceptance of suffering is preferable to a phony psychologist's (Tamkin's) hedonism. Concludes that Wilhelm's and Wordsworth's persona both learn that rather than being a cause for despair, suffering allows one to recognize common humanity and learn to love everyday life with all its tenderness, joys, and fears.

Ciancio, Ralph. "The Achievement of Saul Bellow's Seize the Day." Literature and Theology. Eds. Thomas F. Staley and Lester F. Zimmerman. The University of Tulsa Department of English Monograph Series 7. Tulsa, OK: U of Tulsa, 1969. 49–80. Rpt. in Small Panets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria L. Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 127–56.

What begins as the schizoid estrangement of the individual and his authentic self begets the estrangement of father and son, the individual and contemporary urban world, the Jew and his spiritual heritage, the individual and humanity—issues that Bellow manages to encompass in the short breadth of this novel by focusing squarely on the plight of his protagonist and the real and the pretender souls. Makes much of Wilhelm's radical adolescence and radical innocence. Develops a sophisticated explanation of the intimated relationship between Wilhelm and Tamkin. Defines a zaddick in historical terms and demonstrates Tamkin's role with regard to Wilhelm's salvation.

Endorses the work of Rodrigues and Weiss in explicating SD from various psychoanalyic and psychological perspectives, and sets about amplifying these views through a comparative approach which asserts that Bellow used Oedipus Rex not so much as a model for psychoanalytic truths, but rather as a paradigm for the unchanging human condition.

Argues that the ending of the novel is based on the study of Wilhelm as an infantile regressive who, while in the midst of a mid-life crisis, takes steps toward true maturity as he mourns the corpse (the casting off of his old self) and emerges from the experience more maturely and deeply connected with the world of human beings.

Argues that the fundamental narrative frame on which SD is built is that antagonism set up between Dr. Adler's adherence to "tradition" and Tommy's adherence to the "new." The article concentrates on the Jewish tradition after summarizing the other two mentioned. Covers such issues as the work ethic, the American Dream, Hollywood, the myth of baseball, major aspects of the Jewish and Christian traditions and their primary values. Concludes that Tommy Wilhelm has failed the American tradition of success and embraced the superior Jewish-Christian tradition of responsibility and trust which involves dying to oneself.

The surface world of SD is deceptively modern in construction, comprised as it is of urban alienation materials such as its nightmare urban landscape, pathetic hero and carefully constructed patterns of descent, sickness, decay, impotence and drowning imagery. However, Bellow is actually making clever ironic use of such materials, and particularly with such shopworn materials as absurdist and Freudian estimates of man. SD is actually a drama of seduction in which Wilhelm is forced to faith through having to resist the appealing modernist notions of Tamkin, the espouser of alienation ethics and nihilism. Provoked finally to examine such modernist estimates of life, Wilhelm rediscovers his faith in the human enterprise.

Reviews and rejects critiques of SD that focused on the protagonist's psychic angst in favor of an examination of his alienation due to the ideology of individualism or "the world's business," Reappraises Bellow's humanism and contemporary theories of social constructivism and alienation employed in many critical readings of SD. Asserts that critical readings which see SD as an expression of conservative humanism underrate the novel. Demonstrates an alternative reading which accounts for the characters, settings, structure, and imagery of the novel as contributing to a condemnation of the ideologies of domination at work which commodifies people within a money culture. Hence Wilhelm's final disengagement from what he calls "the world's business," is a renunciation of the ideology of domination. In Wilhelm, Bellow makes the case for the value of an individual with an innate need for the kind of work that lies outside the purview of capital and domination. For Wilhelm, the crowds which throng the pavement outside the Hotel Glorianna are evidence that each individual is valuable. It is this lyric sensibility of Bellow's that suggests his ideological matrix. While being more vulnerable to pain and anger Wilhelm has discovered more freedom. Bellow has inscribed a specific cultural critique in which Wilhelm's is not a renunciation of the world, but of the world's business. Wilhelm experiences not universal human alienation, but alienation from the influences of accumulated capital. Hence this reading takes the narrative out of a universal or "transcendent," framework and places it inside a paradigm which provides a "suspicious" view of the individual culture as impossible. Bellow demonstrates that the individual is not isolated and that Wilhelm's world is a luminous creation of multiple possibilities.

Discusses the two characters of Tommy and Tamkin from SD as Narcissus and Hermes as viewed from the perspective of Hans Kohut's psychology of the self. In terms of Kohutian psychology, Tommy Wilhem is a man in an acute state of self-disorder who yearns to merge with the archaic and omnipotent figure as represented by the psychological trickster. However, although the latter offers him insights, he is too self-seeking, unemphatic, and enfeebled to benefit. As the narcissistic Tommy Wilhelm tends to be highly self-referential and alienated from work and society, the interaction with the mythological trickster helps to overcome a possible stalemate. Concludes that while the encounter with Tamkin threatens to draw Tommy toward self-destruction in the manner of the Narcissus legend, it also offers relief from the burden of self. But unlike the tragic ending of the Narcissus story, the novel seems to suggest that Tommy's surrender of the pretender soul signals temporary relief from suffering and a brief illumination before the symptoms of his disorder are resumed.

Describes SD as a nonstop conversation with many other books, including Job, Ecclesiastes, and the works of Milton and Tolstoy. But more particularly it invokes such American books as those by Emerson and Melville. Elaborates on the progression of Tommy Wilhelm in light of Billy Bud, "Bartleby the Scrivener," and "Lycidas." Concludes that Tommy Wilhelm is an Upper West Side Lycidas and a believer in the Emersonian cult of self-invention. Makes much of Bellow's ability to create an authentic 1950s milieu.

Unlike previous novels dealing with fallen characters like Tommy Wilhelm, this novel embodies the quest for personal light in deliberately romantic structural forms. Like the romantic sun gods, Apollo and Hyperion, Tommy must be schooled in suffering before he can reach his "humanness." In the modern materialistic world, this is a process of losing—not acquiring. Only at this point is true creative energy released. A sophisticated explication in which Tommy Wilhelm is seen as an inadvertent aspirant to romantic ambition.

Compares the state of Tommy Wilhelm to the tortured image of Saint Sebastion on the cover of Kaja Silverman's study of male masochism entitled Male Subjectivity at the Margins. Both texts examine masochism's power to complicate and multiply representations of masculinity in cinema, literature, and society. Both Saint Sebastion and Tommy Wilhelm are bloodied and impaled from seeking love , approval , and recognition from invisible, absent Father/fathers. Employs Silverman's theories of masochism and multiple masculinities as models for examining the cinematic version of SD. Talks of the specularity of the film and Tommy's inner psychic structures as mediated by his desire to be an actor. Describes Tommy's bodily sensations as clues to his impaired ego and masochistic self-hatred. Claims that Tommy is a feminized man who has been castrated, and who founders in a regressive and nearly infantile state. He is the evidence that masculinity rests upon an abyss and means that men must live by "lack." Sees Tommy as evidence of the illusion of fulness with his feminine behavior and histrionics. Concludes that in the film version Adler comes off as death incarnate, while Robin William's institutionalizes Tommy as the ultimate victim.

Hidden, ironic allusions in SD refer to "Ariel's Song" from Shakespeare's The Tempest and W. B. Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium." Both enrich our understanding of death and transfiguration motifs in SD. Concludes that the allusions solidify the book's insistence that spiritual transcendence is possible, despite the odds. Wilhelm goes on his quest not in Yeats holy city of Byzantium, or Shakespeare's magic isle, but in the secular and most mundance island of Manhattan.

Claims that in SD it is the image of mid-century American man that is most significant in the novel. Describes the narrative line of the story and the relationship of the characters within the plot. Treats the father-son theme and the failure of modern man implied in Dr. Tamkin.

Handy, William J. "Saul Bellow and the Naturalistic Hero." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 5.4 (1964): 538–45.

Describes Bellow's break with the Dreiserian and Heming-wayesque naturalistic hero struggling and being defeated in an ultimately malevolent world. Indicates briefly Bellow's affirmative modifications on the naturalistic formula and its premises.

Hattenhauer, Darryl. "Tommy Wilhelm as Passive-Aggressive in Seize the Day." Midwest Quarterly 36.3 (1995): 265–74.

Provides a more pessimistic psychological reading than earlier models by Clayton, Rodriguez, and Bordewyk. Tommy is a classic passive-aggressive personality because he cannot express his feelings, is grandly circuitous, manifests self-destructive tendencies, and engages in futile efforts. Furthermore he both denies and affirms his father and manifests an inability to assert himself. Concludes that Tommy is a jobless, homeless, penniless, suicidal drug addict who will have to overcome extraordinary obstacles if he is to lift himself above all of this.

Introduces the work under the headings: The Setting, Poetry, The Hero, Minor Characters, and Style. A useful overview of major issues in the novel for the beginning student.

Discusses SD in order to show that the ending is hopeful and that human relations, including the father-son relation, is not what Bellow wants to emphasize. Comments that the compact style of the novel creates two problems: 1) the dangling or ambiguous ending, and 2) the primacy of the father-son relationship.

In SD we see that family relationships, not church, army, or big business, form the psychocenter of the novel. Traces convincingly the destructive dynamics and values that govern the failed familial relationships in the novel. The ending of the novel suggests the improbability of twentieth-century familial closeness and indicates that true feeling can only be generated both within and toward one's own self. The unshared life is depicted as a permanent condition.

Describes teaching SD as ethnic fiction to Israeli–Jewish students who failed to see the Jewishness of the text. To them Tommy does not eat Jewish, sound Jewish, speak Hebrew or Yiddish, or have a Jewish girlfriend. He forgets Yom Kippur and only mentions the Holocaust in passing. Describes Bellow's numerous ambivalent remarks about his own Jewishness, and sees as emblematic his highly significant removal of a reference to the Star of David in the next published version published after the Partisan Review initial printing. Argues that the first generation of critics who saw Bellow as a Jewish writer were using him as a mirror for their own Jewish experiences of assimilation. Asserts that Bellow's novels both embodied and transcended Jewishness, and that while SD is a cultural marker of the disappearance of a certain Eastern European style of Jewishness, it is, despite all of its and Bellows's denials and suppressions, a Jewish novel.

Intelligent application of the materials and techniques of Jewish literature infuses the content and style in SD. Set in New York City's decaying West Side, the narrative deals with a multilevel conflict, including, on an allusive plane, the historic antagonism between the Hasidim and their Jewish opponents. Bellow's use of the historic misnagdic and maskilic opposition to the Hasidic way justifies the dramatic function of the novella's minor actors and, more importantly, clarifies the paradoxical nature of Tamkin's character.

Kremer, S. Lillian. "An Intertextual Reading of Seize the Day: Absorption and Revision." Saul Bellow Journal 10.1 (1991): 46–56.

Describes Bellow demonstrating the historic sense that T.S. Eliot asserted "compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones" but with a sense that all literature "has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order." Talks of his work echoing Russian realists, French existentialists, English romantics, American transcendentalists and realists. Uses Bloom's theory of the Anxiety of Influence to frame a detailed intertextual reading of SD. Traces the author's use of stock characters from Yiddish literature and Hasidic folklore. Characterizes Tommy Wilhelm as the schlemiel Hasid and Dr. Tamkin as schnorrer, Hasidic Zaddik and Lamed vov Zaddik, the hidden saint— a dual character who is primarily the corrupt zaddik of maskilic anti-hasidic satire. Tracks other characters, such as Mr. Pearls, to various Jewish, hasidic, and British literary traditions often by secularizing the Jewish source and Judaizing the secular source. Praises Bellow for his enduring capacity to benefit from and contribute to literary traditions in ways that embrace and extend precursor texts, simultaneously effecting absorption of and discontinuity from the past to create literature of prodigious intellectual and spiritual import.

Kulshreshtha, Chirantan. "Seize the Day and the Bellow Chronology." Literary Criterion 13.3 (1978): 29–33. Cited in Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, 1978.

Argues that SD was probably not written after AAM and belongs as a companion piece to DM and "The Bootlegger's Son." Hence Wilhelm's designation as a victim-hero and the obvious resemblances between these texts. SD resembles DM and TV in its meticulous attention to technique and structure.

Bellow leads Wilhelm through a complete progression from foolishness to wisdom. Suggests a relationship to I. B. Singer's "Gimpel the Fool" that Bellow translated just three years before. Suggests Proverbs as an influence. Claims Wilhelm arrives at the heart of his maturity in the funeral parlor.

Discusses the archetypal and symbolic dimensions of Bellow's shorter fiction in which the concentrated line of action and sharply focused characters heighten possibilities of metaphoric import. Notes how the synthesis of the symbolic and the realistic characterizes an increasing number of important twentieth-century narratives. Examines SD in comparison with a wide variety of other modern pieces.

Discusses Bellow in the context of a major article about postwar American–Jewish fiction. Discusses a variety of Bellow novels and short stories under such headings as "Those Kleine Mensche": The Common Man; "Menshlichkayt": vs. Manliness; Man's Mixed Moral Nature; "T Shuva": Turning, Jewish Sources; Cosmopolitanism and Universalism; The Middle Road: And-Romanticism/Anti-Nihilism; Time, History, and Memory; Intellect and Spirit; The Celebration of Talk; and Art as a Humanistic Enterprise.

Discusses the idea that though the novel is centered on a central character facing a moment of deep crisis and self-discovery, the novella is organized through the principle of a shifting center of consciousness that is functional to the deep structure of the text, that is, to the underlying binary pattern of concealment and revelation. Not only is the reader allowed to penetrate the true emotional roots of the protagonist's personality through his thoughts, delusions, and memories, but also he or she is able to see the impact of his appearance on the world both through his father's thoughts and the narrator's grotesque descriptions of his discordant physical traits.

Examines the three meal scenes in SD to demonstrate how they support the implication of carpe diem, and how they differentiate the diners appositely. Argues that, in a world lacking a spiritual component, pursuit of the physical becomes paramount. Suggests that the food that fuels pursuit may even become an end in itself. How Wilhelm Adler, Dr. Adler, and Dr. Tamkin approach mealtime thematically distinguishes their characters. Wilhelm approaches food as a last resort, Adler is calculated, and Tamkin attacks it. The meal themes emphasize the "here-and-now-because-life-is-short" theme suggested by the title.

Martin, John Stephen. "Vision and Visibility: The Phenomenology of Power and the American Literary Consciousness of Self." Canadian Review of American Studies 18.2 (1987): 181–96.

SD is discussed in the context of an essay on the dialectics of consciousness which operates throughout American literature. In SD, the dialectic expresses itself in the hero's identification of a mysterious transcendent ego called by his mentor, a pretending soul, and a radically empirical real soul. Tommy's ultimate accomplishment is to cast off his pretender soul and achieve dignity by cheating experience, and thereby achieving transcendence by giving rise to his true individuality. His ego has given him the power to cope and endure, and is more precious than ideas of Nature or the laws of phenomena. For Bellow it is possible to have a vision that one knows is such a performance of the will, and through such staged performance, to create all that is visible, as well as all that is ineffable, intangible, and invisible. Wilhelm's consciousness is a conscious gesture that dignifies mankind, even if it is fundamentally ridiculous and inane. SD is a typically modern novel because it's theme, consciousness of selfhood, is central to modernism.

Mathis, James C. "The Theme of Seize the Day." Critique 7.3 (1965): 43–45.

Traces the complex strands of meaning and associations set off in the novel by the unconventional use of the carpe diem theme from Shakespeare's Sonnet 73.

SD is problematic in that its intellectual values depend heavily on the enigmatic character of Dr. Tamkin, who, through seemingly negative ideas, communicates positive healing effects. Provides a review of critical assessments of Tamkin and argues that Tamkin uses his imaginative vision to communicate cogent visions of human reality. These are generally analogous to a developing vision postulated in Bellow's later novels. Like Bellow, he is dedicated to a cultural and spiritual mission he believes can be carried out through his art. Traces these ideas throughout this and later novels.

Provides a general overview of the theme and style in the novel. Develops a slightly more detailed analysis of its patterns of animal and water imagery.

A general discussion detailing the exact dimensions of Tommy's defeat in modern America. Concludes that the journey was simply too rigorous for him, that he really didn't have what it takes to negotiate modern America, and that Tommy cannot "protect himself from the savages" by building any kind of a fence. He doesn't really want to die, he just doesn't want to be a man.

Pinsker argues that the poem "Eyes and Tears" by Andrew Marvell provides a striking analogue of Tommy's situation. Pinsker goes on to document the large number of water images in the novel and to conclude that weeping in the novel, as in the poem, is a sign of strength, not of weakness.

Calls Tommy Wilhelm an Augie March grown old and slightly paunchy, with his chances running out. Sees Tommy's collective failures as economic and not human. Traces the plot and concludes that Tommy Wilhelm is a Woody Allen style sensitive flop who speaks directly to the zeitgeist in which anti heroes seem the only heroes left.

Porter, M. Gilbert. "Seize the Day: A Drowning Man." Whence the Power? The Artistry and Humanity of Saul Bellow. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1974. 102–26. Rpt. as "The Scene as Image: A Reading of Seize the Day." Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Earl Rovit. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N J: Prentice, 1975. 52–71.

Pugh, Scott. "Stylistic Indeterminacy and the Opening of Seize the Day." Kyushu American Literature 28 (1987): 29–37.

Argues that the elusive style in which the [first] paragraph is presented establishes in its very elusiveness a standard of indeterminacy which has far-reaching ramifications not only in terms of style but also in relation to character, symbol, theme, and narrative point of view, a claim which may be substantiated by a detailed examination of internal evidence.

Posits the existence of Gregorian and Jewish time in SD. Argues that Gregorian time: the season, month, and day-date of Wilhelm's "day of reckoning," appear to be easily identified. Traces all of this in great detail through the novel, showing several inaccuracies in Wilhelm's recollections. This blurring is significant. If one looks at it from the perspective of Jewish time, it would appear that the Jewish calendar is of great significance in the story. It is the religious nature of the Jewish calendar and its associations with Shavu'ot that provide the most extensive and interesting reading of Wilhelm's "Day of Reckoning." Bellow is showing a bi-calendric double-vision. Wilhelm is actually receiving hints from another reality at work in our lives, and this suggests that even if Wilhelm is not restored to his Jewish faith, faith is still possible.

Develops the thesis that there is no longer a unitary personality in the novel that emerged after the hardboiled era of Hemingway. True identity of the real self is always compounded in part of the "Spirit of Alternatives" that appears in many of Bellow's novels. Interest in this stems from Bellow's interest in psychoanalysis and Jungian psychology. Believes a man's character runs "contrary ways" and that "none has as broad and immediate application to American society as the change in Tommy Wilhelm's personality in SD.

Dr. Adler functions as a failed medico and father. Tommy fulfills the role of the maladroit. He is the deluded inheritor of a bogus mythology of commerce like Jay Gatsby, Willy Loman, and others before him. Tamkin the magician, however, is the archetypal shaman who has a special form of medicine power. His is, in fact, the trickster-transformer. He is a master at exorcising tormented souls of evil things. Kin to Tommy as his name suggests, he becomes Tommy's elected father and finally his savior, only to disappear magically as Tommy takes possession of himself in the funeral parlor.

Traces the evolution of Tamkin from a variety of sources: Reich, the American literary con man, and the con men of Chicago who inhabit Bughouse Square and Hyde Park, and particularly Yellow Kid Weil.

Calls this film production, funny, grim, and suffused with a dark ribbon of nervous energy. Describes the performances of various actors and the film sets.

Tommy Wilhelm and "You" in Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City are strikingly similar portraits of failure in twentieth-century American literature. Both are tales of unfulfilled youth; the parallels include similar views of contemporary life involving loss of religious and ethical values and the adoption of nihilism as a religious ideal in its own right. In the end both protagonists are on the road to a healthy perspective, with clean slates, free of guilt, and ready to experience joy.

Examines the multiple implications of both water and ossification imagery in SD as clues to several obvious and many buried levels of meaning. A detailed and complex treatment.

Begins with an elaborate series of definitions of Jewish literature in other than Hebrew languages, refuting some and finally settling on the fact that "a culture with a dual identity is not simply a theoretical creation of historians of literature but, rather, an empirical entity. Its literature is a highly complex embodiment of both identities" (58). What follows is an elaborate historical and comparative examination of German and American Jewish literatures. Points out that because modified Jewish culture has moved from one place of exile to another throughout history, the identity of its readership has changed, as have the authors. Concludes: "Yet the problem of identity plagues Jewish writers, their characters, and their readers as much as ever" (79).

Examines SD as an existentialist novel emphasizing the aspect of individual choice as the chief criterion. Explores the relationship of this novel to its two predecessors. Mines several of Bellow's essays and interviews for supporting arguments.

Likenesses between Steppenwolf and SD point to some shared concerns of both Herman Hesse and Saul Bellow. Such con-terns include suffering, the dual nature of the individual, adult isolation, the human meaning of finality, and "the heart's ultimate need." Bellow finally reverses Hesse's isolating duality and supplants it with evidence of man's tendency toward inclusiveness.

Argues that place, space, and pace are closely related notions in SD, as well as important conceptual tools employed in analyzing the formal structures and communicative aesthetics of cinema narratives. Illustrates how Bellow's imaginative literary relations in the notions of space, place, and pace are transcribed in a Cinematic reading of the novella, in which thematic concerns are made usually congruent with structure, dynamics, and aesthetics of filmic narrative. Moves through each scene systematically. Concludes with a discussion of the arresting effect of the freeze-frame conclusion to the film.

SD presents an analysis of human isolation in mid-twentieth-century New York through ironic play on the central carpe diem motif. Hence, Bellow is able to detail the manifold discordances between Wilhelm's world and the literary world evoked by the book's title. A sophisticated treatment of Bellow's inversions and uses of the traditional associations suggested by the carpe diem cannon of literature.

Argues that Bellow's Jewishness is most explicitly seen in SD because here we see ethical monotheism and the tradition of taking stock of oneself in the Rosh Hashanah Yom Kippur traditions. Argues that it is through these traditions fully assimilated Jews are reminded of their bond with Judaism and of the necessity for an ethical bond with humankind. Even though Tommy is inarticulate in traditional theological terminology, and although no narrator translates his experiences, Tommy still acts out of a modern sense of diaspora and observes the day as a Jew in exile cut off from his father and engaged in repentance. While SD does not replicate the religious service on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), the process described in the novel is allegorical of such an atonement. Concludes that SD is a piece of conversion poetics, calling the reader to become a mensch in a world seeking to reduce all to a faceless and characterless universal humankind.

Provides an intertextuality study of SD and Mother Night on the basis of their conversation about man's predicament in the contemporary world for the last four decades. Without necessarily influencing each other, they employ two different modes of narrative writing and treat two dissimilar problems tin their novels. Bellow writes in the traditional realistic mode, while Vonnegut writes in a postmodern metafictional manner. Vonnegut talks of the subversive forces of science, technology, and war, while Bellow believes human beings can survive humanly. Provides an elaborate comparative chart of parallel and parallel themes and issues. Concludes that for explicatory purposes, such a study can illuminate themes, character , and parallel situations regardless of any direct conversation, allusion, or reference, in either text to the other.

Discusses the textual conections between TV, AAM, and SD. Traces the shared characteristics between Joseph, Asa Levanthal and Wilhelm. Also comments on their affinities with Kafka's victims. Suggests SD belongs to the earliest creative work by Bellow and was written at the same time, and not in 1956 when it was published.

Notes the intensity of suffering in the Bellow protagonist and argues that "their plight is not offered as a statement that the ultimate nature of reality is either hopeless or absurd. Bellow does not let his people evade the harsh facts of pain and death, but neither does he mire them in meaningless misery . . . . Instead, writing with what John Clayton calls' a 'moral seriousness' that is noticeably anti-modernist, Bellow restates in fresh idiom the traditional dictum that suffering is educational, suffering humanizes" (365).

Svrljuga, Zeljka. "Et bidrag til genreteoorien: Bekjennelsesromanen: En analyse av Saul Bellow's Seize the Day." New Essays on Seize the Day. Ed. Michael P. Kramer. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1998. 43–70.

Teodorescu, Anda. "Introduction." Traieste-ti clipa [Seize the Day]. Saul Bellow. Bueuresti: Univers., 5–11. Cited in Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, 1972.

Trowbridge, Clinton W. "Water Imagery in Seize the Day." Critique 9.3 (1967): 62–73.

SD is an essentially positive work depicting the birth of Tommy Wilhelm's soul through a pervasive pattern of drowning and other water imagery. Traces Tommy's ironic passage from apparent despair to a rebirth through drowning. Water imagery is especially significant since it is an emotional birth which is occurring. Argues that SD demonstrates the use of the symbolist technique at its best.

Sees the central theme of the novel as being Tommy Wilhelm's identity—a problem intimately tied up with his confusing number of names. Reviews all of the phases of Wilhelm's search for identity in relation to names he is currently using and their particular cultural and symbolic significance.

Examines SD for evidence of Bellow's preoccupation with the costs for the human soul of achieving civilization. Sees SD as one of Bellow's major discussions of "civility" in its staging of contrasting styles of behavior, moral and economic, within the psychosocial dynamics of the father-son relationship. Sees SD as a reverse immigrant novel showing the intrafamilial costs of new American economic striving and the loss of "old System" Eastern European emotional styles. Argues that Bellow is fiercely attached to the immigrant generation, and that spiritually he is descended from the baffled and heroic Jewish fathers with their "Jewish opera." Uses "The Old System" as a cultural and familial context for SD by examining the emotional losses and dilemmas of Isaac Braun. Also uses Irving Howe's A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Biography (1984) and Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage From Home (1946) to provide further context for SD's complex examination of the immigrant past, its fathers, the palpable sense of loss and cultural estrangement, and its filial rupture.

Weiss, Daniel. "Caliban on Prospero: A Psychoanalytic Study on the Novel Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow." American Imago 19.3 (1962): 277–306. Rpt. in Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 114–141; Psychoanalysis and American Fiction. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: Dutton, 1965. 279–307. Rpt. in The Critic Agonistes: Psychology, Myth, and the Art of Fiction. Daniel Weiss. Eds. Eric Solomon and Stephen Arkin. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1985. 185–213.

SD concentrates on the father-son relationship that proceeds with unceasing conflict toward ultimate atonement. In this novel it stems from neurotic conflict between instinctual cravings and outwardly determined frustrations. The pattern of repression and its eventual shattering suggests close parallels with the situation revealed in Kafka's "Letter to His Father" Sees Tommy as a moral masochist who hates his father and adopts Tamkin as a substitute for his dead mother. The actual day of the novel's action is a day of traumatophilia that induces, among other neurotic reactions, conversion hysteria in the suffocation episodes. All resolves itself with Tommy's eventual healing through Tamkin, the surrogate and psychoanalyst.

Sees Tommy Wilhelm as perversely unheroic. Despite its pathos the novel is really a comic study in mediocrity. Criticizes the book for being small and for returning to the themes of the earlier fiction, rather than moving out toward those suggested by AAM.

Explains how other languages and language texts, especially Bellow's own translations from Yiddish, shape the context of SD. Describes each of Bellow's three major acts of translation and how they create a dynamic that then takes place in the imaginary fictional space. Notes that all three were performed by Bellow in the decade 1953–63, thus framing the period in which SD was written. Provides a detailed account of how Bellow construes himself as cultural mediator in his translations of "Gimpel the Fool," and the Great Jewish Short Stories by removing the Yiddish and Hebrew liturgy and language for an American audience. Describes how for Bellow Singer servers as a point of departure, an origin and sign of the authentic past now annihilated, abandoned, and assimilated. Hence the Bellow/ Singer intertextual dynamic is instructive with regard to the rewriting of Jewish literary memory. Provides an exhaustive treatment of the intertextual Hebrew and Yiddish sources which permeate SD. Demonstrates how Bellow has crossed the boundary to the past and reshaped the representation of that past to achieve both continuity and discontinuity. In this way he simultaneously creates the survival of the Yiddish text for Jewish literature, and the accommodation of it for American literature. Concludes that this leaves open the question of who Bellow is when he is at home.

Allen, Walter. New Statesman and Nation ns 27 Apr. 1957: 547–48.

Alpert, Hollis. "Uptown Dilemmas." Saturday Review 24 Nov. 1956: 18, 34.

Crane, Milton. Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books 30 Dec. 1956: 7.

Fiedler, Leslie A. "Some Footnotes on the Fiction of '56." Reporter 13 Dee. 1956: 44–46.

Flint, Robert W. "The Undying Apocalypse." Partisan Review 24.1 (1957): 139–45.

Swados, Harvey. "The Long and the Short of It." Hudson Review 10.1 (1957): 155–60.

Gill, Brendan. "Long and Short." New Yorker 5 Jan. 1957: 69–70.

Gilman, Richard. "The Stage: Novelists in the Theater" Commonweal 29 Mar. 1963: 20–22.

"Upper West Side." Newsweek 19 Nov. 1956: 142–43.

Gold, Herbert. "The Discovered Self." Nation 17 Nov. 1956: 435–36.

Hicks, Granville. "Collections of New and Classic Works by Saul Bellow, Orwell and Wilder." New Leader 26 Nov. 1956: 24–25.

Kazin, Alfred. "In Search of Light." New York Times Book Review 18 Nov. 1956: 5, 36.

Lynch, John A. "Prelude to Accomplishment." Commonweal 30 Nov. 1956: 238–39.

Rolo, Charles J. "Reader's Choice." Atlantic Jan. 1957: 86–87.

Rugoff, Milton. "A Saul Bellow Miscellany." New York Herald Tribune Book Week 18 Nov. 1956: Part I, 3.

Schwartz, Edward. "Chronicle of the City" New Republic 3 Dec. 1956: 20–21.