Theme of Alienation in Saul Bellow’a Seize the Day

Alienation or sense of separation is one of the dominating themes in Bellow’s novel Seize the Day. Saul Bellow is primarily concerned with the well-worn modern dilemma of the individual: desperately isolated and profoundly alone in a society whose only God is money. As the story opens, Bellow’s hero, Tommy feels out of place in this hard world of money, selfishness and exploitation. It is a world which has a non- human and animal like frame work, where feelings ad emotions have no significance.

As the story opens, Tommy is in a state of extreme ignominy, forty four years old, overemotional and heavily dependent. He is caught and crushed in a world devoid of heart in which feelings and emotions have no significance. He is disillusioned in a world where there is no caring and no real communication among the men. In the lower middle class, densely populated section of New York cit, Tommy lives I hotel, Gloriana. His father lives also in the same hotel apart from his son. People talk to each other, do business, pass the time or day, but somehow do so only superficially.

The theme of ignominious isolation is established in the firs several pages of the novel when Tommy stops to get his morning newspaper from the Rubin. Both of them pretend that they are intimate in their talking, but neither of them talks about important issues. Their issues involve only trivial matters such as the weather, Tommy’s clothes, gin game etc. Though both men knew many intimate details of each others personal lives neither of them talks about it. As the author says,
“None of these could be mentioned and the great weight of the unspoken left them little to talk about.”

Tommy also thinks” He (Rubin) meant to be conversationally playful, but his voice had no tone and his eyes, solace and lid-blinded, turned elsewhere. He did not want to here. It was all the same to him.”

Tommy’s biological father Dr Adler even refused to become involved in his son’s desperate loneliness. In Tommy’s case his aged, rich and successful father is physically present but emotionally distant. Tommy is badly in need of money which his father could provide him with. But Dr. Adler is greatly pained when the subject is said. More than money, however, Tommy needs communication with an understanding heart. Again and again he appeals repeatedly to his father for compassion. But he endeavors vainly to penetrate the boundary that surrounds his father. The appeal is always futile. He receives nothing from him but selfish advice as his father says,
“I want nobody on my back, Get off! And I give you the same advice, Wilky. Carry nobody on your back.” His father’s response is ever old, detached, yet bitter and angry, analytical denunciation of Tommy’s past failures ad present ignominy.

“It made Tommy profoundly bitter that his father should speak to him with such detachment about his welfare. Dr Adler liked to appear affable. Affable! “His own son, his one and only son could not speak his mind or ease his heart to him.”

And in a different way, the circumstances are the same with the rather mysterious Dr. Tamkin, a sort of surrogate father to Tommy. According to Tommy “That the doctor cared about him, pleased him. This was what he earned, that someone should care about him; wish him well, kindness, mercy he wanted. “

Tommy feels that he can talk to and be understood by this doctor. But very soon he becomes frustrated. No consolation comes from this master. At the end of the novel he comes to know that he has merely been used. He apprehends that Dr. Tamkin does not truly care about him or his problems. Tommy sounds-

“I was the man beneath: Tamkin was on my back and I thought I was on his. He made me carry him too, besides Margaret, like this they ride on me with hoofs and claws. Tear me two pieces, stamp on me and breach my bones.”

There are other characters namely- Maurice Venice, Mr. Pearls, old Mr. Rappaport from all these characters Tommy finds no consolation. His wife Margaret has left him but will not agree to make a divorce. Isolation is present between them. Margaret torments and exploits him very much. It is her mission only to victimize her husband. Among others Maurice Venice is another agent of disillusionment Mr. Pearls, a German refuge from a concentration camp and Mr. Rappaport, an elderly clutching player of stock markets. The role of each of these figures only reinforces Tommy’s aloofness.

In Seize the Day the sense of despair and isolation of a modern city dweller is conveyed by the image of a howling wolf. Wilhem is a city- bred man, but still he feels out of place in Newyork. When night comes he feels like holing from his window like a wolf. He is painfully aware of his isolation.

One of the major themes of Seize the Day is the isolation of the human spirit in modern society. Tommy is estranged from his wife, separated from his son whom he clearly loves. He has lost the respect of his father. He is completely crushed by the oppressive forces around him. In the novel the appeal is for the caring, for a sincere feeling of involvement with mankind.

Bellow furnishes that a loving recognition of the natural bond between hearts is essential to a society, which seems to have lost or seems to be denying all social kinship. At the end of this novel, Tommy recognizes his kinship when he finds himself at a funeral, while searching for Dr. Tamkin. As he looks down on the corpse of a stranger, he feels the basic relationship between himself and all men. A relationship is established in spite of superficial and man-made barriers by the bond of mortality. At the end, Tommy manages to savage his feeling. He realizes what it is to be a man. He remains emotionally alive and he is redeemed by being completely human. Wilhem’s identification of himself with the dead man asserts that the day has not seized him. He has seized the day. He has rejected the animal world of Tamkin which is unnatural and morally chaotic. He has flaws but he is finally redeemed. He has found the “consummation of his hearts ultimate need.”

The picture upholds the disintegration of family life in (American Society) Western Civilization. It is indeed a social picture of American life. The emotional aridity, lack of fellow- feeling has rendered Western Civilization a true Waste land.

American Strategy of Success as Shown in Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

The possibilities for self-creation, material success, and absolute freedom are the basis of a powerful American myth. Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day by Saul Bellow is inspired by the same American myth of success.

Saul Bellow portrays that the main business of the city is making money, which is valued above the deeper connections between human beings. In Seize the day, New York City is presented as a soulless place, in which the authenticity of people's lives is distorted in the interests of serving the materialism of society. Ironically, it is the charlatan Tamkin who points this out most clearly, in his description of the conflict between the real soul and the pretender soul. No one is unaffected by this conflict, and in many cases, the pretender soul, the inauthentic self, has taken control.

Dr. Adler and Mr. Perls are materialistic and appear to worship money. It is a post-war, post-depression, cold war, technological world. Adler believes in power and "success" and in rationalism. He is the "self-made man." In fact, Bellow has given Adler the name of a psychiatrist whose teachings were based on ideas of "power." Tommy, on the other hand, is, deep down, is a naturalist and an idealist. He does not understand the financial ways of the city. He is not attuned to the prevailing materialism.

There is a telling moment when the coldly efficient German manager of the brokerage office has to explain to Wilhelm the nature of the document he has signed with Tamkin. The manager is completely familiar with the ways of the city: "Here was a man . . . who knew and knew and knew. He, a foreigner, knew; Wilhelm, in the city of his birth, was ignorant." Wilhelm is a man of feeling and emotion; he does not belong in an environment that values money over human connections.

Wilhelm's financial troubles have more than practical implications. He feels that "everyone was supposed to have money" (p. 30), and his conversations with Dr. Tamkin strengthen his belief that with just a modest amount of will and talent, he could rid himself of financial worry. Tamkin assures Wilhelm that it will be "easy" for him to make much more in the market than the fifteen thousand he needs. Just as Wilhelm believes that he will one day become the person his name represents, so he clings to the hope that easy money awaits him. He assumes that his father would accept him if he had more money.

Everywhere he goes he encounters the materialistic spirit. The old, shriveled, men he meets in the brokerage office have dedicated their lives to making money on the commodities market. But Wilhelm senses something inimical to life in the way the secretive, uncommunicative Mr. Rappaport has made his money, in the "chicken business." He imagines the appalling conditions in which the animals live on chicken farms. Then, when he notices that Rappaport will not let anyone see what he has written on his notepad, he thinks, "this was the way a man who had grown rich by the murder of millions of animals, little chickens, would act."

Again Tommy was not happy in his marriage life. He and his wife are incompatible, but she will not give him a divorce; he feels she is turning his two children against him even as she sends him bills. Among the many bits of advice Tamkin offers Wilhelm ("I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery.") is to practice living in the "here-and-now" and to "seize the day".

Alienation and loneliness are the most adverse effects of American’s materialism. Tommy feels cut off not only from his father and from the rest of his family — his sister, his dead mother, his estranged wife and their two sons — but he also feels alienated from himself and from everyone he meets. Looking outside of himself and his small circle, Wilhelm feels alienated from humanity, as represented by New York City and its inhabitants. He feels that communication with others is as difficult as learning another language. Every other man spoke a language entirely his own. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood. Wilhelm has an encompassing sense that the alienation he feels is not unique to him, but that "everybody is outcast," that the experience of loneliness is part of the human condition.

The materialistic mentality dominates the city and it is the way that a life should be lived. The so-called "American Dream" has taken many shapes — streets paved with gold, a chicken in every pot — but the theme is always the same: financial success.

Spiritual Success Supercedes the Material Success in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day

Bellow sees the problems of the modern world as essentially matters of the spirit. In a high-pressure, pluralistic, threatening, materialistic world, people must find a way to live and to remain human. Tommy does this by recognizing that human beings must accept and share one another’s burdens.

Tommy Wilhelm is a loser. He is divorced, unemployed, broke, undereducated, self-indulgent, and dependent (on pills and his father, among other things). He lives in a hotel in New York City and wants desperately to put his life in order.
Wilhelm thinks of his life as a series of setbacks. A good part of his youth was wasted unsuccessfully trying to make it as an actor in Hollywood. After which he spent several years as a salesman of children's furniture before falling out with the management and resigning. He and his wife are incompatible, but she will not give him a divorce; he feels she is turning his two children against him even as she sends him bills. And his father, from whom he expects a little sympathy and understanding if not monetary assistance, is cold to him.

Tommy, like all Bellow protagonists, has trouble determining how to cope with the modern world.

Tommy makes one last grasp for success by investing in the commodities market under the dubious influence of Dr. Tamkin. His money quickly evaporates and with it his hopes.

Wilhelm must stop playing the "roles" he has been acted and he must find the person that he really is. For instance, throughout the book, he is seen, and sees himself, as "Dr. Adler's son." Later, Tommy becomes attached to Tamkin and the same disattachment is necessary. He needs also to release himself from money's grip and so he must lose all of his money to drive away its lead. Further still, he needs to release himself from Margaret, not from his obligations as a father, but from his victimization of her. In short, the paradox lies in the fact that one must lose everything in order to be free.

The other and final element that frees Tommy is that of love. At this lowest point, Tommy realizes that death is the only way to make connection with other people. Prior to the last scene he sees it only as one more form of alienation and is unwilling to sympathize with the dying all around him. Now Tommy becomes part of the "larger body" of humanity, instead of always being isolated in the crowd. After looking at the body of a man he does not know, breaks into uncontrollable weeping. In the end Tommy feels love for the people around him, and he feels love for the stranger in the coffin. It is a beautiful irony that the self-same society that constricted him can, in the end, be a freeing force also.

The end of the novel is a sharp contrast to the whole novel. Throughout the novel we see the cruelties, self-centeredness and the triumph of the spirituality.
Tommy whole heartedly cries over the coffin of the unknown person. At first, he cries out of his on misfortune and suffering. But at a certain stage he forgets about his own suffering. He truly cries for the dead man. The dead person is not his friend and relative. But still Tommy feels a connection with him. This is a human connection. There is no a slightest element of materialism or self centeredness. Thus, the novelist shows that even is a materialistic society like New York humans can act like human and feel selfless sympathy for others.

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow as an Ethnic Novel

Seize the day is a reflection of the times in which it was written. The novel was written in a post-war world. WWII created several factors that serve backdrop to Wilhelm's isolation, frustration and anxiety and that represent the feeling of many during the period.

First and foremost, war creates disorder everywhere and in many cases dislocation because of forced immigration. During the war many people, Jews especially, were escaping the Germans and, thus, fleeing, when they could. This dislocation results in alienation, materialism, frustration and anxiety.

Tommy is an idealist surrounded by the pressures of the outside world. He is isolated and, thus, is forced to turn inward. The urban landscape is the symbol that furthers his isolation, for he is always "alone in a crowd”. Tommy feels cut off not only from his father and from the rest of his family-his sister, his dead mother, his estranged wife and their two sons-but he also feels alienated from himself and from everyone he meets. Tommy Wilham is shown in desperate loneliness and life annihilating alienation and he is in dire need of an understanding heart. This isolation and inner struggle is the predicament of modernity. Dr. Adler, a symbol of professional success, is reluctant to play any part that may bring consolation and comfort to Tommy’s heart. In respect of emotion and feelings, father and son is ocean apart.

In urban circumstances the rites of love or communion are enormously difficult. In the urban world of New York Tommy is considered to talk to him because there is no one else to talk to among the millions of a city like New York. There every other man speaks a language entirely his own and is an end in himself. Looking outside of himself and his small circle, Wilhelm feels alienated from humanity, as represented by New York City and its inhabitants. He feels that communication with others is as difficult as learning another language. Every other man spoke a language entirely his own. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood. Wilhelm has an encompassing sense that the alienation he feels is not unique to him, but that "everybody is outcast," .Tommy’s experience of loneliness is a part of the human condition in a post war society.

The materialistic mentality dominates the modern city. Dr. Adler and Mr. Perls are materialistic and appear to worship money. It is a post-war, post-depression, cold war, technological world. Adler believes in power and "success" and in rationalism. He is the "self-made man." In fact, Bellow has given Adler the name of a psychiatrist whose teachings were based on ideas of "power." Everywhere he goes he encounters the materialistic spirit. The old, shriveled, men he meets in the brokerage office have dedicated their lives to making money on the commodities market. But Wilhelm senses something inimical to life in the way the secretive, uncommunicative Mr. Rappaport has made his money, in the "chicken business." He imagines the appalling conditions in which the animals live on chicken farms. Then, when he notices that Rappaport will not let anyone see what he has written on his notepad, he thinks, "This was the way a man who had grown rich by the murder of millions of animals, little chickens, would act."

In materially prosperous city of New York frustration prevails and there is hardly any peace or rest. Tommy’s mind heaves under the pressure and weight of the modern city and innumerable problems of the modern age. Here everyone takes pills for the cherished touch of natural sleep and in Dr. Adler’s word- “God knows! These things (pills) get to be as serious as poisons, and yet everyone put all their faith in them.” In depicting anxiety as part of the human condition, Bellow has again and unerringly seizes the prevailing mood of the society. Bellow’s hero beset by anxiety and exhibits all the symptoms associated with it, like constriction of the chest, a lump in the throat, increase in heart beat etc. All these are the direct outcome of anxiety that modern city dwellers undergo.

Treachery and oppression control modern society. The mysterious Dr. Tamkin tricks Tommy Wilhelm into giving him his last seven hundred dollars to invest. He assures Tommy that this investment will make him wealthy. But Tommy is painfully deceived by him.

Tommy’s vindictive wife Margaret extremely hostile to Tommy Wilhelm, tries her best to victimize him and ruin him both financially and emotionally for her self-interest. She capitalizes every opportunity to oppress Tommy. In his miserable state, Margarate appears to Tommy as a symbol of oppression, only to add to his predicament.

Bellow as a modern master touch up the subject of modern man’s misery.
Bellow's themes namely alienation, hard world of money, anxiety, deception and selfishness not only depict the American life but also the complexity of modern society. Saul Bellow generalizes his theme. So from this point of view we can say that Seize the day is an ethnic rather than an American novel.