All of Elkin's fictions grow from the interaction of the protagonist and his professional role. Professional concerns are the basis upon which the literary structure is built. The fictional structure is not, however, the linear or curvilinear path of the protagonist's career,… but rather the cluster of episodes which dramatize the development of the protagonist's character. Plot is secondary. (p. 198)

The hero's occupation is important stylistically as well as structurally. It is common enough for novelists to place stress upon their protagonists' profession, but it is an unusual aspect of Elkin's fiction that the profession is so often one bound up with spoken English. All of Elkin's heroes, whether they are in business or in entertainment, share a passion for speech-making. They oscillate between rhapsodic and rhetorical speechmaking, i.e., between speeches in which the speaker's love of literary elements, such as metaphoric patterns, becomes almost an end in itself and speeches in which literary devices are employed as a means of persuading the audience. Whenever the obsessed hero finds himself in rhapsodic ecstasy, he reminds himself of his need to communicate with others and thus to preserve himself from the isolation which threatens him. Once, however, he resumes his role as rhetorical speaker, he realizes that his speech, no matter how brilliant or persuasive it seems, is liable to fall upon deaf ears. The circle is completed when he withdraws again into rhapsody chiefly out of despair over his listeners' unreponsiveness. In self-conscious self-expression, he is both actor and audience. His progressive estrangement from the ordinary is mirrored in a linguistic shift from conventional to avant-garde modes of expression.

If Elkin's oscillation ended at the pole of rhapsody, if the circle closed in a kind of solipsism, his fiction would take on the darker tones of a writer like Samuel Beckett, whose comedy verges on tragic despair, but Elkin's heroes do not surrender to hopelessness. From the Boswell of his first novel to Ben Flesh in [The Franchiser], Elkin's protagonists tend to be stubborn believers in the possibility of communication. Some protagonists do give up the struggle, but most continue to speak and to argue that orphanhood is a fate we need not passively, wordlessly accept. (pp. 199-200)

Operating from a gesellschaftlich [modern society] base, Elkin's heroes find substitutes for lost gemeinschaftlich [traditional community] values compatible with their way of life. Their lack of roots in an organic community is symbolized by their literal or metaphorical orphanhood. Without families, his heroes are deprived of, or free from, the most important remnant of Gemeinschaft in the modern world. Besides this existential premise, their fate is also conditioned by urbane professions. Their life styles are based on a literal or metaphorical salesmanship. Through orphanhood and salesmanship they are marked as typical products of the modern Gesellschaft.

Critical of their own identity, they intuitively know what they lack—loving and lasting ties with family and friends. In their vain attempt to recapture values that vanished with the passing of traditional communities, they realize that they are deeply committed to modern society, i.e., to themselves as free individuals. They are, finally, unwilling to deny their orphan-and-salesman identity, difficult as it is.

Elkin's heroes are occupationally typical of modern society…. Because they are completely absorbed in their work, in their ambition to enhance their individual will in a mass society, they have lost the shelter of a community. (p. 201)

[In Elkin's novels] the heroes' conflict between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is reflected by the contrast between their disappointed family life and their professional enthusiasm. Leo Feldman in A Bad Man … is in search for an absolute freedom of fixed relationships and a realization of his salesmanship…. [He] approaches the limits of his strength by having himself imprisoned in order to experience total isolation; he reviews his tense relationships with family, friends, and business partners; he fights the authoritarian power of the prison warden. Unwilling to play any ascribed role, only the role of his self-chosen profession, Feldman is inclined to overturn people's concepts of themselves and of himself by playing games in which roles are changed…. [Bad] man Leo sees more harm in the fixed, dull, lifeless, repressive relationships typical of a Gemeinschaft than in his competitive, provocative gambling. His salesmanship emphasizes such competition; he acts out his profession neither for profit nor for love but for the excitement of the unexpected, of feeling alive … and for the sake of intense communication. [He] repeatedly risks his life but is more conscious of the danger and more self-confident of his survival. (pp. 203-04)

[In The Dick Gibson Show] Dick Gibson's goal is pursued in comparative moderation. His broadcaster profession makes his interest in communication as prominent as Leo Feldman's investment in salesmanship. Yet, despite his work in a modern mass medium and his fight against authorities, he is in search of the ordinary, of family and love, perhaps all the more intensely. Paradoxically, radio, for all its modernity, seems to contain a potential for Gemeinschaft. Photographs of whole families united in front of the black box symbolize this to Dick Gibson. However, he distrusts the suggestive pictures and is not content with nostalgia. After a long apprenticeship, his discovery of an ideal format—the telephone talk show—finally furnishes him with an unprecedented, direct person-to-person radio contact with an invisible family of man. Radio, by definition a product of Gesellschaft, offers a satisfactory modern alterative to the conventional family. With his strong inclination toward the values of a Gemeinscahft, Dick Gibson, more than Leo Feldman, is prone to submit to the magic he is occasionally threatened by in his professional role—which in turn determines his identity. Like Leo Feldman, however, he consciously reveals the magic as a hoax. The two heroes resemble each other most in their respect for communication and their implicit and explicit belief in a family of man.

The three heroes of Searches and Seizures … exceed Feldman's dangerous trial of his gesellschaftlich behavior and Dick Gibson's more moderate vision of his public and private responsibility. They seek the extravagant and the fantastic. In the novellas, the pulls of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft amount to almost superhuman, stylized polar forces. Archetypal phenomena seem to loom beneath the surface of modern society. In this decadent civilization, the bailbondsman, capitalist, and intellectual each discover that they must play the roles that are expected of them. Rebelling, Alexander Main goes on a man hunt; Brewster Ashenden, instead of marrying a rich dying lady, rapes a bear; and Marshall Preminger chooses death over life at the condominium as the more fitting response to his disappointed dream of gemeinschaftlich shelter. (pp. 204-05)

[The Franchiser] synthesizes elements from many previous works but comes to a conclusion of its own. Another of Elkin's orphan-salesman heroes, Ben Flesh, surprisingly, is adopted and a profession is ascribed to him. Yet his "family ties" are artificial and his franchiser project is a compromise between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. From the beginning of his Finsberg heritage, his professional career is determined, his sales-man's freedom limited by family responsibility. The family of man Dick Gibson strives for and eventually achieves with the finding of the ideal radio format, Ben Flesh inherits. Through the Finsbergs and the franchises, the brotherhood of man and the homogenization of America seem accomplished. When the energy crisis strikes, however, Ben realizes that his project, his American dream, had been doomed from the start. His adoption had only been a first symptom. Although he lovingly fulfills his obligations to the dying Finsberg family by selling his franchises, he knows that he is, ultimately, alone with his true orphanhood and the [multiple sclerosis] that is his very own energy crisis. Yet he does not—like Marshall Preminger—commit suicide when he is deprived of the hope for human shelter. He prepares for death by investing—independently—in yet another franchise, the Travel Inn. A monument to his changed life and a final symbol of Gesellschaft, it sells shelter to the homeless traveler.

The franchiser, more than any other hero, has witnessed his realization of family and also its tragic disappearance. He is thrown back upon his orphanhood—the proper symbolic role for a Gesellschaft. Although his experiment with the ideals of a community has failed, he continues the search for these ideals within society, where they appear on a transformed scale…. [The] spirit of Gemeinschaft does indeed continue to survive even in the most modern of societies. For Elkin to have realized this at a time when numerous novelists have chosen rather to cry out bitterly against an allegedly absurd universe, is a remarkable achievement.

The specific nature of this achievement becomes even clearer when one realizes tt Elkin has staked out a claim to an aspect of modern society which most writers have shunned in horror: popular and consumer culture. While subject matter and style of the Metafictionist have become increasingly elitist and esoteric, while Black Humorists are so emotionally involved in popular and consumer culture that they oscillate between loathing and adoration, Elkin has managed to occupy a middle ground between disdainfully ignoring and uncritically celebrating the contemporary commonplace. Like recent painters working with the visual environment of popular culture—comic books, advertisements, films, newspapers and magazines—Elkin has exploited and illuminated the imaginative potential of institutions like Howard Johnson's and Holiday Inn. In his Whitmanesque catalogues of popular culture and its artifacts, he has achieved a poetic effect and discovered symbols appropriate to the age. By attaching aesthetic significance to phenomena which have been either scorned as subculture or mass culture or exalted as "the real America," Elkin has challenged contemporary clichés. (pp. 205-06)