Why do you think Bellow gave Wilhem a girlfriend, Olive, and a sister, Catherine, a talentless painter who, like Wilhem (Tommy), also has created a new name for herself (Philippa)? I mean, how would the story be different without them?
And what did you think of Mr. Rappaport, the blind chicken guy who smokes big cigars. What was the purpose of Wilhelm's meeting up with him?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I thought Olive was a foil to Margaret - "this small, pretty, dark girl whom he adored." She seems a weaker sort than Wilhelm's wife, especially when she cries at "being late for Mass" and gets out of his vehicle a block away "to avoid gossip." Margaret doesn't seem to be that kind of person, judging from her description: deliberate, decisive.
ReplyDeleteMr. Rappaport - interesting that you should mention him! He puzzled me. At first he seemed like some bizarre comic relief, then it got more complex. In some ways, he reminded me of Wilhelm's father in that Wilhelm seems to crave some sort of affirmation from him: "Silently, by a sort of telepathic concentration, he begged the old man to speak the single word that would save him, give him the merest sign." Like Kim mentioned, Wilhelm is always yearning for someone to empathize with him and pity him.
Olive is interesting, yes, as a counter to Margaret. One wonders whether Wilhelm adored her because she was, as you noted, a meeker sort. She was a devout Catholic, but not so devout as to refrain from an affair with a married man. All religions have hypocrisy and moral disconnection, but the Catholic variety has always interested me, because having been raised Catholic I saw a lot of weirdness, such as someone believing it was a great sin to miss Mass or confession but not, say, to get a divorce or use birth control or commit adultery. That's probably a state of mind that Wilhelm can sympathize with because his own moral life seems so self-serving.
ReplyDeleteWilhelm's affair with Olive also turned him into the cliche traveling salesman who falls into tawdry liaisons to supply the missing excitement in his life. And there's the beginning of a parallel between him and Mr. Rappaport, who supposedly has two families. Wilhelm, with Olive, had kind of been setting up an alternate life/household, even though he hadn't taken it to Rappaport's extreme.
I wondered what exactly attracted Olive to Wilhelm and why she was bothering with him. What did he have to offer her?
ReplyDeleteI thought maybe the Catherine character was included to imply that the other child in the family was sort of odd and screwed up, too. That it wasn't only Wilhelm who couldn't meet his father's expectations.
Good question. I thought the same thing about Olive. Why would she bother with Wilhelm? Except that she was single and he was good-looking with an abstract interest in marrying her. Not much to go on there. Also, it would be somewhat odd for a devoutly Catholic girl in that era to be interested in marrying someone who wasn't Catholic.
ReplyDeleteCatherine I couldn't make sense of. Wilhelm didn't really like her either, did he? He didn't care for her painting. Neither did old Dr. Adler, who refused (rather sensibly?) to subsidize a gallery for her work. I had the feeling, though, that the doctor wouldn't have approved of an artist in the family, even if the artist were genuinely good. Wilhelm and his sister weren't even mediocre, though, so all the worse for them.