SOURCE: "William Saroyan and the Family Matter," in MELUS, Vol. 9, No. 4, Winter II, 1982, pp. 13-24.

In the following excerpt, Bedrosian examines the sense of waning community felt by ethnic individuals in Saroyan's fiction.

In one of his numerous autobiographies, William Saroyan once wrote of his dead father's failure to express the emotional truth of his life through aborted literary attempts. Now, over a year after his own death, these words offer one of the aptest commentaries on Saroyan's writing as well:

He hadn't made it. But as if as a special favor to me he had kept a record of it, of the failure, the loss, and the finality. . . .

In a sense the writing was my own, and I didn't like it. It just wasn't tough enough for the truth of us, of this world, and I wished it had been.

What we discover in the work of...