24: Tommy Handley

Hahaa, sun vika John! Olet perisyntinen!
ellauri222.html on line 215: But there is usually one fully imagined character in Bellow’s books, one character whose impulses the author understands and sympathizes with, whose sufferings elicit his compassion, and whose virtues and defects, egotism and self-doubt, honorable intentions and less than honorable expediencies are examined with surgical precision and unflinching honesty. That character is the protagonist—Augie, Herzog, Chick, even Tommy Wilhelm, in “Seize the Day,” who tries to leverage his pain to win respect. Their real-life counterpart is, of course, Saul Bellow, whose greatest subject was himself.
ellauri222.html on line 511: Mrs. Klein is Jimmy’s mother. She is overweight and can’t keep on her feet very long. Her hair is dyed black and hangs in braids, making her look like an Indian. She has eight children, including Gilbert and Velma, who are both divorced, and Tommy, who works at City Hall. There are always grandchildren in her home. When Mrs. Klein dies, her husband marries again to a longtime sweetheart.
ellauri222.html on line 761: The first novel to display Bellow's characteristic expansiveness and optimism, The Adventures of Augie March presents a dazzling panorama of comically eccentric characters in a picaresque tale narrated by the irrepressible title character, who defends human possibility by embracing the hope that "There may gods turn up anywhere." Subsequent novels vary in tone from the intensity of Seize the Day to the exuberance of Henderson the Rain King to the ironic ambiguity of Herzog, but all explore the nature of human male freedom and the tensions between the individual's need for self and the needs of society. Augie March, Tommy Wilhelm, Eugene Henderson, and Moses Herzog all yearn to please themselves by finding the beauty in life. By creating these highly individualistic characters and the milieu in which they move, Bellow reveals the flashes of the extraordinary in the ordinary that make such fun possible and rejects the attitude that everyday life must be trivial and ignoble. It is like that just for the losers.
ellauri222.html on line 767: In their quest to find the beaver that gives meaning to life, Bellow's protagonists must also come to terms with death. The message Bellow conveys in almost all of his novels is that one must fear death to know the meaning of life and what it means to be human. Henderson overcomes his fear of death when he is buried and symbolically resurrected in the African king Dahfu's experiment. Similarly, in Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm confronts death in a symbolic drowning. Charlie Citrine in Humboldt's Gift echoes Whitman in viewing death as the essential question, pointing out that it is only through death that Sauls can complete the cycle of life by liberating self from the body. Bellow's meditations on death darken in Mr. Sammler's Planet and The Dean's December. While the title character in Mr. Sammler's Planet eagerly awaits the death of the person he most values in the world, Bellow contemplates the approaching death of Western culture at the hands of those who have abandoned humanistic values. The Dean's December presents an apocalyptic vision of urban decay in a Chicago totally lacking the comic touches that soften Charlie Citrone's portrait of this same city as a "moronic inferno" in Humboldt's Gift. An uncharacteristically bleak yarn from he old standup comic. With More Die of Heartbreak and the recent novellas, however, Bellow returns to his more characteristic blend of pathos and farce in contemplating the relationship between life and death. In the recent Ravelstein, Bellow once again charts this essential confrontation when Saul recounts not only his best friend's death from AIDS but also his own near-death experience from food poisoning. Through this foreground, in a fictionalized memoir to his own gay friend Allan Bloom, Bellow reveals the resilient love and tenderness that offer the modern world its saving grace.
ellauri222.html on line 795: Though in some ways separated from American society, Bellow's protagonists also strongly connect their identity with America. Augie begins his adventures by claiming, "I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city." Almost all of Bellow's novels take place in an American city, most often Chicago or New York. Through his depiction of urban reality, Bellow anchors his novels in the actual world, and he uses the city as his central metaphor for contemporary materialism. Although recognizing the importance of history and memory, Bellow's novels maintain a constant engagement with the present moment. His characters move in the real world, confronting sensuous images of urban chaos and clutter that often threaten to overwhelm them. Looking down on the Hudson River, Tommy Wilhelm sees "tugs with matted beards of cordage" and "the red bones of new apartments rising on the bluffs." Sammler denounces contemporary New Yorkers for the "free ways of barbarism" that they practice beneath the guise of "civilized order, property rights [and] refined technological organization." In Humboldt's Gift, which is replete with images of cannibalism and vampirism, Charlie Citrone sees Von Trenck, the source of his material success, as "the blood-scent that attracted the sharks of Chicago." Acknowledging the influence of the city on his fiction, Bellow himself has remarked, "I don't know how I could possibly separate my knowledge of life such as it is, from the city. I could no more tell you how deeply it's gotten into my bones than the lady who paints radium dials in the clock factory can tell you." However, although the city serves to identify the deterministic social pressures that threaten to destroy civilization, Bellow's heroes refuse to become its victims and instead draw on their latent nondeterministic resources of vitality to reassert their uniquely American belief in individual freedom, as well as their faith in the possibility of community.
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