The problematic theme to which Bellow has been irresistibly drawn from Dangling Man to Mr. Sammler's Planet is that of trying to reconcile virtue with the fact of self-consciousness: can modern man attain "dignity," can he live a "good" life when he must assume the traditional function of God, when he himself must judge his own frailties, cowardices, and ignoble motives?…
For Bellow, a story-line seems more than anything else a weblike scenario that he weaves more and more tightly around his captured protagonist; it is primarily a method of presenting the stifling power of the human predicament in order to measure his hero's ability to endure the harrowing weight of his own life. In effect, the typical Bellow plot is rarely more than a device to bring his protagonist and his reader into a heightened emotional awareness of the thin sliver of freedom that life permits to consciousness. In fact, one can readily imagine Bellow under different circumstances being perfectly comfortable as an eighteenth-century essayist—formidably intelligent, comprehensively "liberal" in a crisply satirical way, and slightly contemptuous of such errant frivolities as fiction. In Mailer's work, the story-line appears to be almost arbitrary and incidental to the sporadic pronouncements of "truth" that the continuity of events (usually encounters of violence and/or sex) provides for…. (p. 163)
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