Saturday, October 17, 2009
It's your funeral
Why did Bellow end the book with Wilhelm bawling at the funeral of a stranger? I think we've all had the experience of a particular sadness recalling every sadness and feeling like a conduit for generalized grief, but did this ending work for you as the conclusion to Wilhelm's tale?
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I did like the funeral scene, but it wasn't very satisfying to me as an ending. It just left too much unresolved. I was actually kind of hoping he'd kill himself, which is odd for me because I usually find suicide completely awful, but no one seemed to give two shits about this guy, so what's the difference.
ReplyDelete"I was actually kind of hoping he'd kill himself."
ReplyDeleteHon, you need to stop sugarcoating your opinions, OK? You little sentimentalist, you.
I actually wondered if Wilhelm would kill himself, his desperation having reached such a feverpitch and New York being so full of windows to jump out of. But then I thought that he was probably too vain to ever hurt himself. And I think the fact that no one gave two shits about him probably worked to keep him alive, in a weird way. I mean, he couldn't be under any delusion that his death would elicit any pity from his dad or his wife. He couldn't be operating with that "they're going to be sorry when I'm gone" mentality, because, well, they wouldn't be sorry, which he realized as he cried at the stranger's funeral. His suicide would just confirm his father's assessment that he was a screw-up. And Wilhelm had too much self-regard to kill himself out of self-loathing or anything like that.
ReplyDeleteHe did care about his kids, though, or at least what they thought about him.