Nov 12, 2009

Henderson the Rain King | Characters

As has been suggested in the above sections, Henderson the Rain King is a picaresque, or journey, novel, with a wide variety of characters. In that Bellow selects a retrospective narration for this, the reader sees the characters primarily as Henderson sees them, with only his biased vision of a fellow character as the reader's guide to interpreting Bellow's intentions with respect to this character. For instance, most critics see Dahfu as a somewhat more positive philosophical influence than this discussion has endorsed; by contrast, one early critic of Bellow's fiction, John...