Dangling Man by Saul Bellow

First published: 1944

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1942-1943

Locale: Chicago

Principal Characters:

• Joseph, the protagonist, whose diary entries while awaiting World War II induction constitute the novel
• Iva, his wife
• Kitty Daumler, his former mistress

The Novel

Dangling Man takes the form of a journal kept by the protagonist, Joseph, between December 15, 1942, and April 9, 1943. All the action is retrospective, filtered through the troubled mind of Joseph, and committed to his journal. Introspective and tentative, the entries record Joseph’s increasingly desperate quest for self-knowledge.

As the novel opens, seven months have passed since Joseph resigned from his job at the Inter-American Travel Bureau to await army induction. Because of snarled bureaucratic red tape, he dangles between civilian and military life. A sort of scholar manqué, Joseph had imagined that leisure would allow him to devote himself to study, but he finds himself unaccountably unable to read. Supported by his uncomplaining wife, Iva, in a desultory room in which they have lived since giving up their flat, Joseph grows heavy and dispirited. Continued errands and aimless wanderings signal a paralysis of will that takes the form of obsessive self-absorption. Joseph feels himself changing, becoming suspicious and ill-tempered in his relations with others; he begins to refer to his “older self,” as if he were once a different person. It is this identity crisis underlying Joseph’s journal entries that forms the true subject of Dangling Man.

While the device of the journal imposes an overall chronological pattern on the novel, several of the most important entries are devoted to Joseph’s extended accounts of prior events, some of which took place before his writing began. Perhaps the most crucial of these flashbacks, the one that goes furthest toward explaining how the old Joseph became the diarist, concerns the Servatius party of the previous March. At the party, Joseph is shocked by the defects in friends whom he had glorified as a “colony of the spirit.” Their petty cruelties, culminating in the sadistic treatment of the hypnotized Minna Servatius by Morris Abt, disillusion Joseph, who henceforth thinks of his friends as having failed him. The episode marks the onset of Joseph’s growing sense of alienation. Succeeding episodes trace his disaffection from his brother, Amos, whose money he refuses and whose spoiled daughter he spanks when she calls him a beggar; from his in-laws, the Almstadts, whose solicitousness he regards as phony; from his mistress, Kitty Daumler, who “betrays” him with another man after he neglects her; from his wife, Iva, who resents the role he imposes upon her; and, most critically, from himself.

Joseph’s alienation stems from his fatal inability, first revealed to him at the Servatius party, to answer the question, “How should a good man live; what ought he to do?” In the first of the two imagined conversations with an invented Spirit of Alternatives, Joseph thrashes about in a hopeless effort to close the gap between the ideal construction and the real world. Apparently one requires an ideal construction—God, art, money—as proof against chaos. Unfortunately, none of them suffices. Believing in the efficacy of reason yet haunted by a failure of vision, Joseph wallows in a sea of alternatives, obsessed by a seemingly insoluble dilemma. He begins his second conversation with the Spirit of Alternatives by returning to the question of how a man should live, arguing strongly that self-knowledge is a prerequisite for freedom, without which man can never attain the ultimate goal of governing his own destiny. “Then only one question remains,” replies the Spirit of Alternatives, “. . . whether you have a separate destiny.” Joseph pales, unable to answer the question posed by his alter ego.

With the coming of spring, Joseph’s despair deepens as he comes to realize fully that freedom, unaccompanied by comprehension, is meaningless. One dreary and drizzly night, having quarreled with Iva and noisily vilified their neighbors, Joseph rushes from the house, to stalk the streets aimlessly. Oppressed by images of dissolution—a scurrying rat, a torn umbrella, a stagnant puddle—Joseph takes the decision to surrender. Heading directly for the draft board, he writes out a request to be called up “at the earliest possible moment.”

The scene at the draft board is the climax of Joseph’s quest for self-knowledge and, therefore, of the novel. No longer dangling, Joseph has answered the question posed by the Spirit of Alternatives in the negative: He has no separate destiny. Henceforth, he will be defined as a soldier, a member of a group which confers that identity upon him which he could not achieve in solitude. Written on his last day as a civilian, Joseph’s final journal entry expresses only relief from the burden of self-determination and freedom: “Hurray for regular hours! And for the supervision of the spirit! Long live regimentation!”

The Characters

Because Dangling Man is a journal, it is inevitable that its protagonist, the diarist, dominates the novel. Like Saul Bellow at the time of the book’s action, Joseph is in his late twenties, Canadian-born, the son of Russian immigrants who relocated to Chicago during his boyhood. Yet Joseph—his surname is conspicuously omitted—is less an autobiographical character than a kind of 1940’s American Everyman. In his state of dangling between civilian and military life during a period of historical crisis, Joseph, with all the young men of his generation, awaits war and future uncertainty. This tenuous limbo, rendered increasingly absurd by the length and unpredictability of its duration, triggers the obsessive introspection that produces his journal. An eighteenth century aficionado as a college history major, a former Communist, a lover of classical music, Joseph sprinkles his entries with references to figures as disparate as Denis Diderot, Karl Marx, and Joseph Haydn as he gropes toward self-understanding. Unwilling to accept either of the fashionable modern shibboleths—unreason or nihilism—Joseph at first welcomes his enforced freedom as an opportunity to discover how a good man should live. Paradoxically, however, he is undone by the very moral idealism he espouses. Racked by guilt, beset by dreams of death, increasingly at odds with friends and relatives, he grows masochistic and misanthropic in his deepening isolation. Whether his ultimate failure is a paradigm of human frailty or merely a result of personal inadequacy, Joseph’s attempts to answer the big questions, no matter how often they misfire, lend status to his characterization.

The progress of Joseph’s alienation can be traced in his worsening relations with friends and relatives. Nearly every human contact is designed by Bellow to reveal aspects of his hero’s trauma. Myron Adler, Morris Abt, Minna and Harry Servatius, old friends and members of Joseph’s “colony of the spirit” are suddenly found wanting. Myron, who tries to find Joseph a job, is accommodating, Mavis cruel, the Servatiuses tasteless. His brother’s family and his in-laws fare no better. Amos’s repeated offers of money and a job evidence a sense of superiority rather than brotherly concern. Amos’s wife, Dolly, is suspicious and patronizing; their daughter Etta spoiled and hateful. Joseph’s in-laws, the Almstadts, are despised—she for her foolishness and apparent malice, he for his unquestioning stolidity.

Joseph is at his most unattractive, however, in his dealings with the two women in his life. With his wife, Iva, he is supercilious and domineering. Perhaps because she is generally uncomplaining and self-effacing, and exists chiefly as the locus of Joseph’s guilt feelings for his bad behavior, her characterization seems perfunctory. While long-suffering, however, she is not spineless. Her deliberate drunkenness at the Servatius party and her frequently sharp rejoinders to Joseph’s browbeating constitute refusals to conform to the pattern that he tries to impose upon her. Also, her unwavering love in the face of Joseph’s negligence and nasty moods shows up the poverty of his affections. Joseph’s relationship with his mistress, Kitty Daumler, is no more satisfactory. Vivacious and faintly exotic, Kitty, in her frank sensuousness, is a welcome contrast to Joseph’s characteristic indecision and guilt. Although he is flattered by Kitty’s love, his feelings for her, like those for Iva, seem tentative and partial, and he is mostly relieved when the affair ends. As different as Kitty and Iva appear to be, they serve identical purposes in Dangling Man: to throw Joseph’s self-absorbed alienation into high relief.

Sharply drawn minor characters interact with Joseph to round out Bellow’s portrayal of his troubled hero. Vanaker, who lives down the hall, uses the bathroom noisily and leaves its door ajar, throws a great many empty whiskey bottles into the yard, and even steals Joseph’s socks. Joseph’s increasing hostility to a man he once regarded as a harmless loon traces the downward curve of his despair, and his subsequent shame at his treatment of Vanaker signals his “adjustment” after he receives his induction notice. Alf Steidler, an extravagantly theatrical acquaintance of long standing, and a sickly and shabby middle-aged woman peddling Christian Science tracts, represent competing solutions to the problem of living. Alf’s pathetic flashiness, ubiquitous cigars, and interminably predictable stories comprise a life-style based upon gestures, trivial though consistent. The anonymous woman rapidly whispers her memorized sales pitch through “lips come together like the seams of a badly sewn baseball.” Hers is the religious solution, its heartfelt sincerity evident in her clumsiness. Neither Stadler nor the woman offers “ideal constructs” acceptable to Joseph; both embody the frustration of an impossible quest which eventually leads Joseph not toward but away from freedom.

Critical Context

An immediate critical success, Dangling Man was a first novel that pointed not only to the direction of its author’s later work but also to that of American fiction itself. Encapsulating the psychology of the 1940’s, it simultaneously looked ahead to the fiction of the 1950’s. On the first page of Dangling Man, Bellow speaks disparagingly of the “hard-boiled”: “They are unpracticed in introspection, and therefore badly equipped to deal with opponents whom they cannot shoot like big game or outdo in daring.” This scarcely veiled reference to Ernest Hemingway contains Bellow’s rejection of externalization and his intention to create a fiction of the inner life. His Joseph, introspective and flawed, is the model for all the later Bellow heroes who struggle mightily to understand and to find salvation through reason. The many alienated figures whose introspections crowd the pages of contemporary American fiction are Joseph’s descendants.

In its style and aims, no less than in its characterization, Dangling Man has pointed toward Bellow’s future work. Tersely reported evocations of grim urban landscapes relieved by sporadic metaphysical flights, all filtered through a troubled central consciousness, established a narrative mode that Bellow has never abandoned. Later protagonists, older and more sophisticated than Joseph, act on a wider stage and philosophize more abstrusely. Yet their struggles, essentially similar, are expressed by similar means. At the outset of his career, Bellow found, in Joseph’s dangling, a metaphor for the human condition. All of his future protagonists would dangle, sifting alternatives, searching for the proper means of carrying on their lives. Beginning with Joseph, these free agents, morally aware and hungry for values, have done battle against the forces of nihilism and unreason. For Bellow’s is finally a fiction that is dedicated to the celebration of human potentialities.

Bibliography

Bach, Gerald, ed. The Critical Responses to Saul Bellow. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. A collection of critical essays on Bellow’s career from the 1940’s to the 1990’s. Includes essays on Dangling Man, a chronology of Bellow’s life, and a bibliography.

Cronin, Gloria, and Ben Seigel, eds. Conversations with Saul Bellow. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994. A collection of interviews with Bellow from 1953 to 1992 in which the novelist reflects on the craft of writing, his approaches to fiction, and his times.

Noreen, Robert G. Saul Bellow: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. A bibliography of criticism on Bellow.

Shatzky, Joel, and Michael Taub, eds. Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Includes an entry on Bellow’s life, major works, and themes, an overview of his critical reception and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

Trachtenberg, Stanley, comp. Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. A compendium of essays about Bellow and his work. Beginning with the novels of the 1940’s and 1950’s, the reviews and articles discuss Bellow’s heroes as seekers and doubters and treat some of the author’s main themes.

Wasserman, Harriet. Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow—A Memoir. New York: Fromm, 1997. An illuminating memoir by Bellow’s former literary agent. Wasserman gives insights into Bellow’s personal and literary life and his approaches to writing.