Introduction & Overview of Seize the Day

This Study Guide consists of approximately 59 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Seize the Day.

Introduction & Overview of Seize the Day

This Study Guide consists of approximately 59 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Seize the Day.
This section contains 303 words
(approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Buy the Seize the Day Study Guide

Seize the Day Summary & Study Guide Description

Seize the Day Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections:

This detailed literature summary also contains Bibliography and a Free Quiz on Seize the Day by Saul Bellow.

Bellow's fourth novel, Seize the Day was published as a novella in 1956 in a volume that also included three short stories-"A Father-to-Be," "Looking for Mr. Green," and "The Gonzaga Manuscripts" and a play, The Wrecker. Considered by many critics to be Bellow's finest work of fiction, the novella was immediately singled out from among its companion pieces as a major work. The powerful impact of Seize the Day comes from its tightly constructed plot; from Bellow's ability to control effectively in a concentrated form such enormous themes as victimization, alienation, and human connection; and from his creation of Tommy Wilhelm, one of his most moving protagonists.

Bellow's work before Seize the Day had attracted the attention of readers and critics, but he was particularly praised for his achievement in this fourth novel, which Baker says "demonstrates his attainment of full artistic maturity." Seize the Day deals with themes familiar to readers of Bellow's fiction, such as that of the father-son relationship, yet in this novella the concentrated structure enabled Bellow to render this theme more intensely.

At the heart of the action in Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm's relationship with his father revolves around Tommy's neediness and his father's disapproval of him. Tommy's problems with his father feed yet another theme of the novel and of Bellow's fiction in general: alienation from oneself and from humanity. Tommy feels cut off not only from his father and from the rest of his family-his sister, his dead mother, his estranged wife and their two sons-but he also feels alienated from himself and from everyone he meets. Bellow's ability to treat weighty themes in Seize the Day, while making Tommy Wilhelm a pitiable yet sympathetic character, explains the success of this novella: it is capable of seizing both the reader's mind and heart.

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This section contains 303 words
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Seize the Day from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.