Saroyan, William - Margaret Bedrosian (essay date winter 1982)
Margaret Bedrosian (essay date winter 1982)
SOURCE: Bedrosian, Margaret. “William Saroyan and the Family Matter.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 9, no. 4 (winter 1982): 13-24.
[In the following essay, Bedrosian examines three of Saroyan's early works, contending that the sense of self-sufficiency Saroyan portrays in his fiction is permeated with a sense of isolation and loneliness due to the personal circumstances of his own life.]
In one of his numerous autobiographies, William Saroyan once wrote of his dead father's failure to express the emotional truth of his life through aborted literary attempts. Now, over a year after his own death, these words offer one of the aptest commentaries on Saroyan's writing as well:
He hadn't made it. But as if as a special favor to me he had kept a record of it, of the failure, the loss, and the finality....
[The entire page is 5737 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
