ENGLISH SPEAKING LITERATURE AFTER THE 2nd WORLD WAR

TOMMY WILHELM: HERO OR ANTI-HERO?

“Seize the Day” by Saul Bellow

STUDENT: Gabriela Zamora M. Nº: 1566YEAR: 2012

Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec on June 10, 1915. He is known for refuting interviewers and has always kept his personal life very private. Bellow was born of poor, Russian-Jewish parents in Canada. He grew up immersed in the Old Testament and learned Hebrew and Yiddish because his mother desired that her children be Talmudic scholars. Bellow's father, on the other hand, was a business man, a bootlegger, and an importer, who wanted his children to grow up and take advantage of the new world of economic opportunities before them. He wanted his children to either have a profession or to have money. This is significant given that the main character in Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm, battles against his own father's idea of success, which, not coincidently, is very much like Bellow's father's idea of success.

Bellow did not remain in suburban Canada, and he moved in 1924 to the Chicago. It is at this time that the urban landscape began to infiltrate his life and would later reveal itself in his writing. Chicago is where Bellow "grew-up," went to high school, and began his college career. Having attended the University of Chicago for two years, he transferred to Northwestern University where he majored in anthropology. He decided after college to continue graduate studies within the field of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin from which he dropped out of and got married. It was then that he decided to write. He procured a job under the WPA writer's project writing short biographies of mid-western writers, and he later achieved an editorial position for The Encyclopedia Britannica. His first success as writer, however, came in 1941, with the publication of his short story "Two Morning Monologues," in the Partisan Review.

During the course of his life, Bellow would be married three times, have children, teach at numerous universities, including the University of Minnesota, New York University, Princeton, Bard, the University of Puerto Rico, and the University of Chicago, and he would be given a number of highly prestigious awards. Saul Bellow has been the recipient of various National Book Awards, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Prix Litteraire International, the Jewish Heritage Award, the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, and, most importantly, the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he received in 1976.

Bellow was born in 1915, thus he came of age during the depression. He lived through World War II, and was even in the Merchant Marines, he saw the wartime economic boom of the forties and fifties, and experienced the Cold War first hand. Given that the protagonist of his novel, Seize the Day, has reached the age of forty-four in the 1950s, all of the above becomes applicable not only to Bellow, but to the protagonist of his novel and to its context.

Tommy Wilhelm lives in the America of the 1950's, which means that the backdrop of his life consists of a newly made, strong American economy, and of a country at "war" with the Soviet Union that uses the tools of science and technology as weapons. Psychology and science appear over and over in the novel, as does the new urban experience—the big city at its economic height. With all of this in mind, Bellow has decided to place the protagonist of his novel at odds with the world around him. Tommy's "inner" world, his feelings and his human needs, are in constant battle with the external world of money and business.

Tommy Wilhelm, the novel's protagonist, is a forty-four-year-old man who is living temporarily in New York City. He has left the country, which he likes, and has moved to a hotel in New York's Upper West Side to ask for his father's assistance. He is a man who has had many an odd job after a stint in acting but ended up with a steady job in sales. However, he has been laid off from his sales job, he has a strained relationship with his father, he has been separated from his wife, he is in love with a woman he cannot marry, and he has invested the last of his money in a joint investment venture that is bound to failure. Tommy is a character in turmoil. He is burdened by the loss of his job, financial instability, the separation of his wife, and his relationship with his father, among other things. He is a man in search of self who the reader is allowed to watch and follow through the course of a single, significant day in his life. However, on the day that the narrative takes place, Tommy must rid himself of all of this and find out who he really is.

Is Tommy Wilhelm a hero or an anti-hero?

While a hero is traditionally a fortunate individual of superhuman power or spirit, an anti-hero is by definition the opposite of a hero and is thus a person who is neither strong nor purposeful. An anti hero may be portrayed as having little control over events, seeming aimless or confused, or as being out of step with society. Tommy Wilhelm is an anti-hero. He does not have Herculean strength nor has he Achillean prowess, nor does he has the sky kissing magnanimity of a Shakespearean tragic hero. As a result failure shapes his future. He seems to drift through his life, making poor decisions that remove him farther and farther from his family and friends, and he feels like an outsider in the city of his birth.In Seize the Day, Tommy, being caught in an existential crisis, is in quest of identity or meaningful existence. He is engaged seriously in a struggle for survival. He fails, he suffers, and he is rejected. He is turned into a puppet at the hands of scrubby opportunist. His hope is ever crossed and his mind suffers the stings of torments. Tommy is too much emotional and childish and these very features make him dependent on others. Being unable to solve his problems, he rushes to his father for substantial support and he gets nothing but rebuff. Dr. Adler likes to appear affable. His own son, his one and only son could not speak his mind or ease his heart to him. This is also the reason that he gives Mr. Tamkin the power of attorney to deal with his last survival without knowing him perfectly. Decisions made up the history of his life. He had decided that it would be a bad mistake to go to Hollywood, and then he went. He had made up his mind not to marry his wife, but ran off and got married. He had resolved not to invest money with Tamkin and then had given him a check. In this novel, the alienated hero is a terribly oppressed individual and it is with the feeling of his oppression that the fiction begins. Despite all these, Tommy is a hero, as he possesses something noble and magnanimous. Despite all circumstances of oppression, despite the violence and threat of being overthrown, Wilhelm decides to retain humanity. He refuses to become a heartless man. Tommy is placed in a perplexing situation of making a choice between humanity and heartlessness. Though he sees nothing but a bleak future before him, he decides to retain humanity, admits love and longs to have a place in thehuman community.At the end of the novel, the protagonist realizes that he is being carried by a crowd and ends up inside the chapel where the funeral of a stranger is taking place. Tommy finds himself before the body of a dead stranger and begins to cry and cry and cry. His tears swell and he "cries with all his heart." The book ends with strangers wondering who he is and how he knew the deceased and it ends with redeeming tears. He has not the superhuman dimensions of Shakespeare’s unforgettable tragic heroes and for all these aspects we can call him an anti-hero. But taking into consideration the end of the novel, we can say that Tommy’s life has suffered a turning point and for that reason we can call him “hero”.

Webgraphy:

http://literary-articles.blogspot.com.ar/2010/02/tommy-as-anti-hero-in-saul-bellows.html

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/seize/canalysis.html#Tommy-Wilhelm