Explicates the metaphysical issue of whether a man might choose his own fate or whether it is chosen for him. Traces Bellow's handling of these ideas through his early short stories and through DM. Proceeds then to examine Asa Levanthal's problem in TV. Concludes that in TV Bellow treats the subject simultaneously at two different levels—the realistic and the symbolic.

An exemplary nightmare novel in the Jamesian tradition of the well-made novel. Leventhal emerges in this critique as a complex and ambiguous protagonist in whom Bellow invests all the mystery of the victim-victimizer syndrome. Develops in great depth the complex relationship between Allbee and Leventhal. Part of this focuses on the redemptive implications of it for Leventhal as he learns compassion. Also accounts effectively for the Mickey and Elena subplot.

Discusses the influence of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamzov and TV. Traces the possible influences incident by incident. Both novels develop the theme of who is responsible for accidental suffering and both radiate an eloquent protest against this. Ultimately, Leventhal fails to make the kind of growth Ivan is capable of. He remains a passive victim being led to a seat in a darkened theatre by an unknown usher. He is the typically weak-willed twentieth-century hero unable to engage with higher reality.

Albee's employment of the figure of Caliban as a racist metaphor is the reification of modern racism. Furthermore, his casting of Jews as immigrants outside of American culture erodes racist and anti-Semitic discourse. The governing dynamic of Bellow's narrative seems to be a deflection of anti-Semitic identification of blackeness and serves to exacerbate the desire of those outside traditional and predominant definitions of Americanness to occupy the centers of cultural power and exercise the powerful discourses that emanate thence. Other characters also participate in this anti-Semitism TV is an illustration of post-war scientific rationalization of racist politics and racist anti-immigration policies. Eventually, desire for assimilation conflicts with remembering the Holocaust, producing, in TV, Bellow's anxious configurations of post-Holocaust self-hatred and his projections of blackness onto others. Leventhal is traumatized by his survival. In TV the excavation of anti-Semitism, and, more particularly the Holocaust and its remembrance, will also drag a coterminous and concomitant black history to the literary surface. Embedded in Bellow's Caliban is a literary history of the configuration of blackness. It is the anxious return of Holocaust memory which raises issues of blackness. Witnessing blackness in TV registers the failure of a collective memory to, in effect, rewitness the Holocaust. The figure of Caliban is the paradigmatic locus of translation and metaphoricization of relations along the European-American-Native American frontier. Bellow admits the grounds on which the articulation of blacks, Jews, slavery and the Holocaust can take place in American itself. Finally, traumatic effectivity, though, in Bellow's America of 1947, with the Holocaust too recent an event, prevents his fuller articulation of the Black-Jewish Atlantic displacing in TV anything other than the traces of such a matrix.

Argues that with regard to ethics and the influence of nationalism, Bellow would appear to be caught between a number of identities to which he can legitimately lay claim and his chosen to explore in his work: Jewish, American, and that of the Western liberal democrat. Compares Bellow's self-fashioning and ethical position in two works written 30 years apart: TV and TJB. While the former appears to manipulate the reader's responses one way, the later work is designed as a tart reminder of the opposite direction. Concludes that while TJB attempts to establish a clear opposition between true and fake victims and their respective champions, and ends up being a myopic book which avoids the ethical complexities of TV. TJB removes complexity by removing vast hordes of people from the map, literally and metaphorically. He has failed to realize that it is never simply a question of whether my country is right or wrong.