SOURCE: Kuzma, Faye. “The Demonic Hegemonic: Exploitative Voices in Saul Bellow's More Die of Heartbreak.” Critique 39, no. 4 (summer 1998): 306-23.

In the following essay, Kuzma views More Die of Heartbreak as a text shaped by nihilism and the discourse of fashionable cynicism.

Saul Bellow's novel More Die of Heartbreak opens with the observation of its narrator Kenneth Trachtenberg that his maternal uncle Benn Crader is obsessed with a cartoon by Charles Addams, author of Monster Rally. The cartoon depicts a couple in a cemetery. The man, Gomez, asks: “Are you unhappy darling?” and the woman, a witch named Morticia, replies: “Oh yes, yes! Completely.” That her unhappiness could motivate such an affirmation is incongruous—as if to say the couple is content with being miserable or that they are monsters to one another and happy with what they have made of themselves. For Benn Crader, the cartoon epitomizes modern...