SOURCE: Bedrosian, Margaret. “William Saroyan and the Family Matter.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 9, no. 4 (winter 1982): 13-24.

In the following essay, Bedrosian examines three of Saroyan's early works, contending that the sense of self-sufficiency Saroyan portrays in his fiction is permeated with a sense of isolation and loneliness due to the personal circumstances of his own life.

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...