Humboldt's Gift | The Ardor of Bellow’s Guilt-Ridden Protagonist
In the following essay, Cohen considers the ardor of Bellow’s guilt-ridden protagonist and his response to the intense feelings that torment him.
In Saul Bellow’s recent novel, Humboldt’s Gift, the protagonist, Charlie Citrine, and Von Humboldt Fleisher, the dead poet he mourns, have been readily identified by some readers as Bellow himself and Delmore Schwartz. Bellow denies these simple identifications, claiming that ‘‘Von Humboldt Fleisher is a composite’’ and that it ‘‘never was true that a character in a novel must be true to a historical person. There is a difference between a portrait and a picture. A picture allows more freedom.’’ Thus Bellow denies that Humboldt’s Gift is autobiography...
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