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saul_bellow, usa

The Victim by Bellow
The Victim (1947)
by Saul Bellow
294 pages - The Vanguard Press

'In these cases, though, you get all kinds of rumors. Who knows? The truth is hard to get at. If your life depended on getting it, you'd probably hang. I don't have to tell you how it is. This one says this, and that one says that. Y says oats, and Z says hay, and chances are...it's buckwheat. Nobody can tell you except the fellow that harvested it. To the rest it's all theory.'(pg.87)

Asa Leventhal lived through some difficult times in his young adulthood, but now has reasonably established himself in a respectable job, married and living in New York City. While his wife is away at her mother's during the summer, Leventhal runs into Allbee, a man who he's only met on a few occasions, but who has noticeably come down in the world. Allbee blames Leventhal for ruining his life, and doing it maliciously. Allbee keeps on harassing Leventhal, and though Leventhal is annoyed by this, he is also afraid that there may be some truth to what is being said. Adding to Leventhal's stress during the summer is the illness of a child in his brother's family.

What this novel really does well is explore the inner chaos that can result when you are obsessed with what other people might be thinking of you, and the impossibility of getting a clear picture of what opinion people really have of you. There are some very good sections, but others are quite dull, especially in the group conversation scenes, and Bellow regarded his first two novels (of which this is the second) as the 'apprenticeship' before his real work. Just as the first, Dangling Man borrowed its structure from Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, many people see a parallel between this novel and two Dostoevsky stories, The Eternal Husband and The Double. Another possible symbolic level is a sort of transposition of the story of World War II, specifically the Holocaust, as Leventhal is Jewish while Allbee, who heaps blame for all his troubles on him, is a gentile; a possible interpretation that gains more validity in the last few pages of the novel with an attempted poisoning by gas.

'You couldn't find a place in your feelings for everything, or give at every touch like a swinging door, the same for everyone, with people going in and out as they pleased. On the other hand, if you shut yourself up, not wanting to be bothered, then you were like a bear in a winter hole, or like a mirror wrapped in a piece of flannel. And like such a mirror you were in less danger of being broken, but you didn't flash, either. But you had to flash. That was the peculiar thing. Everybody wanted to be what he was to the limit.' (pg.98)