William Gaddis

Start Free Trial

William Gaddis American Literature Analysis

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

In “The Rush for Second Place,” an April, 1981, essay for Harper’s magazine, Gaddis spelled out the central concern of his fictions. “The real marvel of our complex technological world,” he writes, is “that anything goes right at all.” Events seem to follow a law of entropy: The more complex the system or message, the greater the chance for disorganization or error. Thus, in a United States grown hugely complex, there is “failure so massive,” Gaddis argued, that no one is accountable, and few things seem “worth doing well” any more. From these convictions spring some of the main difficulties in reading Gaddis’s works. The initial difficulties are of style, and they chiefly involve the complex allusions woven into the fabric of his dialogues and brief descriptive passages. They also involve Gaddis’s experiments with dialogue.

The allusiveness of Gaddis’s writing was a notable trait from the beginning. The Recognitions quotes and makes other forms of indirect reference to a wide range of texts: Snippets of T. S. Eliot’s poetry appear alongside other literary allusions, but the principal field of reference is that of religious myth and mysticism. Gaddis draws from secondary works of scholarship such as Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1948) and James Fraser’s massive The Golden Bough (1890-1915), as well as from an impressive range of primary texts by the Catholic Church fathers (Saints Clement and Ignatius), and other sources such as the Qur’n, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, and books on occult beliefs and practices.

For his second novel, JR, Gaddis once more cast a wide net, bringing into play allusions to pre-Socratic philosophy, the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Germanic mythology—especially as it was popularly embodied in Richard Wagner’s operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (wr. 1848-1852; The Ring of the Nibelung). Initial reviews of The Recognitions were perhaps harshest in judging these seemingly overdone scholarly tendencies in Gaddis’s writing. Nevertheless, a first-time reader of Gaddis’s novels does well to keep in mind that this allusive quality serves his aim of satirizing the uses of Western knowledge; a number of the allusions mouthed by characters are drawn from dictionaries of quotations and clearly participate in Gaddis’s broad satire of those who pretend to learnedness.

Taken at a distance, the allusions to world mythologies are also crucial to Gaddis’s great theme. They evoke a technologized, modern world in which meaning has shattered into “sound bites” or fragments of political and social dogma or even into mere errors. It is a world in which individuals long, often nostalgically, for totalizing messages, for the very stuff that myth provides.

The second stylistic difficulty of Gaddis’s writing springs from his experiments with dialogue. Along with James Joyce, and especially American authors such as Donald Barthelme and William S. Burroughs, Gaddis has stripped his characters’ direct speech of any conventional markers. He eliminated not only the quotation marks (which is the first thing the reader notices) but also markers such as speakers’ names, details about voice inflections, gestural counterparts, or contextual details identifying the localities of speech.

All such narrative particulars may still he embedded in the characters’ direct discourse (or, as well, they may not be). A Gaddis novel thus demands a much more active reader to reconstruct these ordinary signs of narrative art; eventually, in fact, one begins to know the voices by means of identifying tics, such as Jack Bast’s expletives or J. R. Vansant’s repeated exclamations (“Well holy!”) in JR . The result is an auditory performance of human speech, in all its fragmentariness, as if recorded by some omnipresent instrument. From...

(This entire section contains 5053 words.)

Unlock this Study Guide Now

Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.

Get 48 Hours Free Access

these minimal but very potent semblances of speech, one is able to imagine a world, including the knotted woof of the characters’ pasts as they are criss-crossed by the accelerated and very noisy warp of present events.

Gaddis began to develop these rapid-fire dialogues in The Recognitions, with chapters set in the crowded and artistically pretentious nightclubs of Greenwich Village. These scenes of his first novel, composing a minor percentage of the text, are among its most memorably ludicrous for their disconnectedness and qualities of humorous counterpoint. In JR and Carpenter’s Gothic, the technique has virtually taken over. Gaddis’s second novel even dispenses with conventional markers of scene and time change, traditionally handled in fiction by chapter endings and beginnings or by the descriptive interventions of an omniscient narrator. Instead, across its several months of story time and 726 pages of text, JR is one seamless, nonstop ride on the babbling tongues of Americans in the year 1971. To block out chronologically separate scenes, chapter divisions were restored in Carpenter’s Gothic, but they disappear again in A Frolic of His Own.

After his death, Gaddis became a central figure in an ongoing debate on the value of ambitious literary fiction versus conventional fiction. In the 2002 essay “Mr. Difficult,” novelist Jonathan Franzen expressed his ambivalence for the postmodern novel—Gaddis’s work in particular—and the demands that it places on readers, provoking a firestorm of controversy in the literary world.

In large measure, the boldness of Gaddis’s techniques may be gauged by remembering that he was, foremost, a satirist. In traditional narrative satire, it is the function of omniscient intervention both to point out clearly and to judge plainly the exemplars of folly and vice. Gaddis refused to do this. He did, however, weave into each fiction a voice that points the finger and unceremoniously judges; such are the characters named Willy in The Recognitions, Jack Gibbs in JR, and McCandless in Carpenter’s Gothic, who variously served as Gaddis’s outraged mouthpieces. Yet theirs were merely other voices among the din, so the lack of an omniscient standpoint still left the task of moral judgment to the reader. It was only with the posthumous Agap Agape that the reader was addressed directly by the narrator, a fictional stand-in for Gaddis himself. However, the conclusions that the narrator reached in this highly demanding final work still leave the reader unsure of what judgment to make, what lessons to learn.

Doubtless, this is exactly the point. As immensely complex “messages” in narrative, and charged as they are on the hyperspeeds and incompletions of contemporary technological culture, Gaddis’s novels ask the reader to confront forms of “failure so massive” that they would initially seem to defy order or meaning. Having confronted them, though, the reader’s next task is to begin tracing lines of organization and eventually to see that someone can indeed be held “accountable.” In The Recognitions, Gaddis holds up before readers a massive indictment of fakery in all reaches of American culture; in JR, his target is the failure of democratic capitalism as an American ideal; in Carpenter’s Gothic, his subject is the degrading of American millennial ideals by popular media, religions, and politics; and in A Frolic of His Own, it is the abuses of the American legal system under the false pursuit of justice. Defined by thematic intentions such as these, Gaddis’s novels make literary claims of major importance.

The Recognitions

First published: 1955

Type of work: Novel

An artist searches for authenticity and order in a culture defined by its myriad counterfeits and its decline into disorder.

The Recognitions takes its title from a third century theological romance inscribed by Saint Clement, whose story concerned a neophyte’s search for true religious experience in the midst of a corrupted empire. Set in the 1950’s in the United States, and mainly in New York City, Gaddis’s novel nevertheless finds parallels (as one character notes) with “Caligula’s Rome, with a new circus of vulgar bestialized suffering in the newspapers.” Across 958 densely written pages, the text narrates the story of Wyatt Gwyon’s maturation, both aesthetic and spiritual.

Like most of Gaddis’s novels, this one begins with contested lines of descent. From the side of his mother, Camilla (who wanted to name him Stephen), Wyatt has inherited an artistic temperament. From his father, a Calvinist minister, he inherits a severe sense of the damnation of humankind and of his own guilt in particular. During a sojourn in Spain, Camilla dies mysteriously when Wyatt is three, and later the raging fevers of a mysterious childhood illness (drawn from memories of Gaddis’s bout with erythema grave) seem to confirm what he has been taught as a Calvinist.

It is Wyatt’s gift for drawing, however, that seems to pull his spirit back to health. Wyatt opts for divinity school, as had his father, but he paints in secret and eventually leaves the United States for Europe to study painting. There Wyatt is oblivious to styles of modernist art, and his best works are “recognitions” of the Flemish masters of the late middle ages. Disparaged by fashionable critics for this work, Wyatt gives it up, returns to the United States, and settles for draftsmen’s work and a mindless marriage.

Lapsing into cynical despair over his failures, Wyatt is discovered by an art dealer, Recktall Brown, who proposes to employ the young man’s talents in creating almost faultless forgeries of the Flemish masters, which he moreover proposes to have “authenticated” by his associate, a corrupted art critic named Basil Valentine. The circle of this plan closes when Wyatt’s canvases bring spectacular prices and, indeed, even a perverse recognition of his talents. Plunged into the relentless work demanded of him by this counterfeiting ring, Wyatt also falls into the pretentious bohemian demimonde of Greenwich Village. These chapters provide Gaddis opportunities for some of his most corrosive satires of an art world driven by egotism and profit motives. In this middle portion of the novel, Wyatt is virtually surrounded by frauds: Frank Sinisterra, a counterfeiter; Otto Pivner, a failed playwright who fakes a war injury, and whose only artistic motive is pecuniary gain; and Agnes Deigh, an overweight matron of the art world who encourages artists by feeding their conflicting physical and spiritual needs.

Increasingly depressed because of his corruption by money and the semblances of fame in this society, Wyatt considers resuming his divinity studies. The break finally comes after he witnesses Brown’s ludicrous death, in a fake suit of medieval armor. He also causes—or so he mistakenly thinks—the death of Basil Valentine. Wyatt flees America once again, on the same boat which had evidently brought his father home from Spain after Camilla’s untimely death. Wyatt eventually winds up at the same Spanish monastery, at Estremadura, where his mother is buried. Here Wyatt closes a different kind of circle. Not only does he change his name to Stephen, as his mother intended; he also leaves behind the seemingly ceaseless guilt about the conflict of matter and spirit which is his inheritance from his father.

Wyatt resumes a relationship with a Spanish mistress from his first European trip and commits himself to raising a child of that union. He also resumes his theological studies. He accepts the need for earned income, yet he continues with the painting which had been so corrupted by greed. The novel thus ends with tenuous assertions of balance, though on a very small scale. Wyatt/Stephen, his tiny family, their meager belongings, and few paintings suggest a balance achievable only in minimalist forms—a recurring theme in Gaddis’s later work.

Wyatt/Stephen’s solution stands opposite the enormously detailed world that Gaddis realized in this very large tapestry. Gaddis’s satirical target was a society in which, as Frank Sinisterra notes, “Everything’s middlemen. Everything’s cheap work and middlemen wherever you look. They’re the ones who take the profit.” Elsewhere, Recktall Brown (whose name fixes his identity, as do the monikers given to other characters) plans “a novel factory, a sort of assembly line” for fictions that will be patchworked from other texts, for (as he asks), “What hasn’t been written before?” The dialogue of Otto Pivner’s play is plagiarized from Wyatt’s abstruse bar-room speeches, themselves bursting with quotations and allusions. Wyatt’s quest is to get outside these vicious circles. In his last scene, he stands within his monastery room and releases a bird from his cupped hands. The confused creature momentarily flutters before Wyatt’s most recent painting—a work that has given up the apparently ceaseless mirroring of other artworks to become, instead, like a window. This is the most that Gaddis’s dark novel will provide by way of positive values.

JR

First published: 1975

Type of work: Novel

A sixth grader fed promises absurdly builds a megacorporation which spins toward catastrophe and nearly pulls an artist down with it.

In JR, the society of “middlemen” has spread, virus-like, and the resulting depreciation of all values is Gaddis’s main theme. The characters’ desires for commercial and aesthetic success highlight a crisis in values: Artistic significations (words and musical sounds, for example) are conflated with money, and a monetized culture further governed by the principal of usury (the extracting of “interest”) diminishes things all around. In this novel, therefore, money almost literally talks—and does so in relentless, rapid-fire sentences that threaten to drown out meaning. Edward Bast, the artist figure of this novel, must struggle relentlessly to free himself from these conditions. Mostly he struggles with a vastly institutionalized usury that drives him, at novel’s end, into a feverish delirium (brought on by exhaustion and pneumonia) that recalls Wyatt’s at the beginning of The Recognitions.

JR opens in the Long Island home of Bast’s two aging aunts, who are engaged with a lawyer in discussing the settlement of the estate of Thomas Bast—their brother, Edward’s father, and the owner of a business that manufactures player piano rolls. Thomas has died intestate, and thus, as in Gaddis’s first novel, the constituting theme is inheritance. Edward’s appears to be a purely financial legacy, but the characters’ dialogues unfold complications: Thomas’s first wife bore him a daughter, Stella, with claims on the estate; it also becomes evident that Thomas’s second wife, Nellie, may have conceived Edward during an adulterous affair with Thomas’s brother, James. Edward might therefore lay claim to the Bast wealth through either, or both, of these potential fathers. The overriding question, however, is whether he will choose to inherit the gifts of art or money.

Enter J. R. Vansant, a sixth grader at the Long Island school where Bast has been hired to teach music—absurdly, he is teaching Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung for an upcoming performance. JR’s part of the opera is, significantly, that of Alberich, the grotesque gnome who renounces love for money and sets out to enslave men by possessing the golden ring of the Nibelung. Having just returned from a field trip to a Wall Street brokerage house, JR is filled with dreams of unlimited financial success.

A bit of epithetic advice proferred by one of the cynical brokers—“buy for credit, sell for cash”—inspires JR. Scanning the newspaper want ads, working from a phone booth, and aided by an unwitting Edward Bast, JR purchases (on credit) four-and-a-half million surplus picnic forks from the U.S. Air Force, and as quickly sells them (for cash) to the Army. His ventures burgeon from that point, as JR acquires bankrupt companies, empty mining claims, an entire bankrupted New England mill town full of pensioned employees, a chain of nursing homes that services the pensioned millworkers (and is tied to another chain of funeral homes), as well as the Bast family company. In sum, “The JR Family of Companies” (as it is eventually known) balloons around the empty, the incomplete, the aged, and the dead. Yet it is wildly successful. By novel’s end, when JR’s enterprise comes crashing down, it triggers a national financial crisis.

JR functions as the consummate middleman in a society of cynical dealers. Along the way, Gaddis’s satire took aim at Wall Street, at government, and especially at school administrators driven by chances to profit at the same kinds of “business tie-ins” that JR finagles. The novel’s most consistent voice for this corrosive satire is Jack Gibbs, a science teacher at JR’s school. He first appears in the text while trying to teach students the concept of entropy, which predicts the ultimate thermodynamic degradation of any closed system. This theory sets forward a crucial analogy in Gaddis’s novel: in the closed (adulterous and nearly incestuous) system of the Bast family, entropy has seemed to lay their entire estate to waste, and that result is duplicated in the equally closed “family” of JR’s companies, or indeed throughout the economy of which JR’s ventures are simply a part. Gibbs rages against these abuses, and he tries (and in the course of the novel fails) both to love and to write. Thus, he exits the novel an impotent, sickly figure who cannot arrest the general decay, a failure he shares with a swarm of would-be artists around him.

Bast’s story is more suggestive, however. Although plunged into the chaos of JR’s school and business dealings, Bast struggles to compose a vastly orchestrated opera. Frustrated and broke, he barters his services on Wall Street by agreeing to write the musical accompaniment to a documentary film. Failing at both of these—in short, failing at both art and moneymaking—Bast begins limiting his artistic work. In succession he starts, and leaves aside, a cantata and then a suite. His frantic involvements as JR’s “financial manager” drag him down until, exhausted and feverish in the hospital, he composes a brief solo work for cello. Initially he tosses this work in a hospital trash can but, leaving the hospital, he rescues the composition for the simple reason that a deceased roommate had liked the “idea” of Bast’s music.

As in The Recognitions, Gaddis ended his second novel with suggestions that his artistic hero has, at last, managed to get “outside” the social contradictions hemming him in and has done so chiefly by working in a minimalist form. Even so, Gaddis gave his Alberich, JR, the last word. JR is a celebrity now, working the college lecture circuit, appearing in parades and on talk shows, and even contemplating writing a book. His business emerges from the chaos just as recuperated as Bast’s aesthetic spirit. Gaddis’s satire thus turned darker: His artist exits the novel a shambling and harried figure, as money triumphs over all.

Carpenter’s Gothic

First published: 1985

Type of work: Novel

A nexus of political, journalistic, and religious affiliations spin the United States uncontrollably toward a nuclear holocaust in Africa, aided by a Vietnam War veteran.

Gaddis’s third novel in as many decades, Carpenter’s Gothic was also his bleakest satire. Its style, as well as its theme of cultural entropy in a civilization where meaning and value are utterly degraded in a complex “media-scape,” are consistent developments for him. While no plot summary can succeed in conveying the rich tapestry of characters, events, and cultural detailing in his work, this novel is not only briefer (at 262 pages) but also more focused—and therefore more readable—than either of Gaddis’s prior works. For many readers, it therefore constitutes the best door into the writer’s work.

The story centers on the last four weeks in the life of Elizabeth Vorakers Booth, a former debutante and the daughter of a mineral tycoon. Her father’s suicide, nine years earlier, had been a desperate attempt to block the U.S. Senate’s investigation of various briberies, manipulations of the media, and monopolistic dealings in Africa that assured his company’s success. Liz’s husband, Paul, a Vietnam War veteran, transacted F. R. Vorakers’s bribes; he met (and seduced) Liz while testifying before the Congress after her father’s death.

The novel thus opens, as did Gaddis’s prior works, with complications resulting from a father’s will or lack thereof. Desperately frustrated that fortunes are either tied up in lawsuits or manipulated by a network of self-serving associates, Paul Booth rages against his fate, meanwhile goading Liz into pursuing any available tidbits the estate lawyers might give up and prodding her further into a lawsuit he has brought against an airline responsible (he claims) for his loss of Liz’s “marital services” when she was injured four years previously in a plane crash. Meanwhile, he has attached himself as a “media consultant” to the Reverend Ude, a fundamentalist preacher whose South Carolina television ministry is rapidly burgeoning into an influential social and political force.

Paul and Liz are verging on bankruptcy. She approaches their ruin with a pathetic resignation, but Paul drunkenly schemes and rages either at Liz, at the morning newspaper, or at the incessantly ringing telephone, in dialogues that unfold entirely within the Booths’ Hudson Valley rental house, the curiously pieced-together “Carpenter’s Gothic,” which they have rented from a Mr. McCandless.

With McCandless’s entry into the novel, events begin to close in on the characters, as always happens in a Gaddis novel. McCandless, a sometime geologist, teacher, and writer, had surveyed the very southeast African mineral fields in which the Vorakers Reserve Company had consolidated its fortunes years ago, and in which the Reverend Ude is now building missions for a great “harvest of souls” expected during “the Rapture,” or anticipated Second Coming of Christ. McCandless is being pursued by both the Internal Revenue Service for back taxes and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for information about those African territories. He arrives one autumn morning to gather some papers from a locked room. A shambling, weary man, an incessant smoker and an alcoholic, McCandless is nevertheless a romantic mystery man to Liz, who straightaway takes him to bed.

Occasionally bursting into the claustrophobic and chaotic spaces of the novel is Liz’s younger brother, Billy, a curious mix of cynicism and idealism. He is so taken by McCandless’s drunken tirades against the nexus of American media, government institutions, and popular religions that he goes off to Africa himself, where he is killed when his plane is gunned down by terrorists. Events spin toward catastrophe. The Reverend Ude is under investigation for bribing a senator to grant a new television license, and the media skewer Ude for drowning a boy who had presented himself for baptism. In southeast Africa, civil war erupts. Liz learns that all of her stored personal belongings, her final links to family and tradition, were auctioned off.

The end comes on several fronts at once. McCandless, having accepted a CIA offer (or bribe) for his papers, simply exits the narrative after failing to persuade Liz to leave with him. She dies of a heart attack, the warning symptoms of which Gaddis has planted from the novel’s beginning. While doubtless symbolizing an absolute loss of empathy and love in this fictional world, even Liz’s heart attack is ironized when it is erroneously identified as having taken place during a burglary. Paul wastes no time in moving to claim any inheritance due Billy and Liz, and he exits the novel using the same seductive approach on Liz’s best friend that he had used on Liz nine years earlier. In Africa, political events explode: U.S. forces are poised to strike in protection of “national interests”; indeed, apocalypse looms as senators and media commentators laud the use of nuclear weapons—a “10 K ’DEMO’ BOMB OFF AFRICA COAST,” as one headline puts the news.

With this novel, Gaddis brought his satire toward a kind of limit. There is nothing darker or more bitter in his work than McCandless’s ragings against the failures of American democracy. Other than the cynical exits of Paul and McCandless, there seems no way out of this novel’s dilemmas, and there is no generative artwork either, however minimal. Yet this novel clarified how Gaddis’s great subject had always been the United States: the crushing weight of its mass society on the individual, the corruption of its civic institutions, the monetization and hence the counterfeiting of all values, and therefore the loss of its cultural inheritance. These remain the great themes of his satire.

A Frolic of His Own

First published: 1994

Type of work: Novel

The law becomes a powerful weapon that backfires on a highly litigious man whose life is falling apart.

This novel is set thematically by the opening line, “Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.” Justice is conceptual and as an abstract ideal can be perfect, while law is about language and is limited, ambiguous, bound by context. The ideal is often invoked, while the practical application is used and abused by the greedy and self-important. The novel’s title itself is a legal term, referring to a contracted worker who does something not specified in his contract and in doing so injures himself: The example used is of someone blinding himself by shooting paper clips with rubber bands at the office.

College professor Oscar Crease’s life seems to be a constant frolic of his own: Readers first meet him in the hospital, having run himself over when he hot-wired his own car. He intends to sue the car company, Sosumi, and is in the middle of another lawsuit: Oscar claims that a vulgar, best-selling film plagiarized his play about the Civil War (based on Gaddis’s own unpublished play). Returning to the deteriorating house where he grew up and continues to live, Oscar is cared for by his current girlfriend, Lily, and his sister Christina, who is suffering a strained relationship with her husband, Harry. As in other Gaddis novels, a good deal of action occurs offstage and certain characters never appear but loom heavily over those readers come to know. Oscar and Christina must deal with their father, a controversial judge whose ruling on a case involving a dog caught in an abstract steel statue has stirred a frenzy in the local community.

As lawsuits proliferate, so do documents—newspapers, transcripts, screenplays, legal rulings—all of which are parodied by Gaddis for their idiosyncratic use of language. If the flow of dialogue in a Gaddis novel is meant to reflect the thought processes of human beings, then the written documents are more insidious for being more consciously crafted and thus manipulated in unusual ways. Humor is mined when dialogue and the written word clash, and Gaddis infuses a great deal of aesthetic criticism and allusions into the documents that litter the novel: Judges make elaborate references to literature, while lawyers debate philosophical issues—all, it seems, in the service of the law, all mere fodder to the dehumanizing interaction of frivolous legal arguments.

Freed from justice, the law in A Frolic of His Own swings back and forth: Rulings are held in the balance, decided in favor of one side, reversed. Fortunes also swing in more literal fashion as the Creases, apparently affluent, are beset by bills that they cannot pay, with Oscar counting on lawsuits ruling in his favor for future income. The familial and legal dysfunctions unite gracefully when Oscar wins his suit against the film: The decision in his favor seems to have been molded by his estranged father, who dies soon afterward but has at least made this strange rapprochement with his son. It quickly becomes a Pyrrhic victory, however, as the producers claim that no actual profits have been made, while the estate that Justice Crease leaves behind for his children is little else but the expensive, deteriorating house. By the end, Harry is also dead (his life insurance paid to his law firm), and the Crease orphans are broke. The novel closes with Oscar tickling Christina until she cannot breathe, both of them reduced to a powerless infantilism.

Agap Agape

First published: 2002

Type of work: Novel

A dying man makes his last statement about the history of the player piano and its relevance to modern culture.

Surrounded by the documents and papers accumulated over the course of his life, the dying man who narrates Agap Agape is desperate to convey what he can of his work. The title is a pun: agap is a Greek word referring to unconditional brotherly love and community, now most commonly used by Christians. For such love to be agape may mean that it has been torn apart, or caught off-guard and surprised. Indeed, in tracing the history of the player piano to other developments in the modern world—including the rising use of binary (which in turn led to the computer age), as well as changing attitudes about the individual’s relationship to art—the narrator is filled with frustration at how the significance of his work is not appreciated by the world at large.

There is a strong autobiographical element to the narrator, as Gaddis was also aware of his impending death and had decades of notes regarding his own history of the player piano. The writing is dense and intimidating. The syntax is more complex than any previous Gaddis harangue, with no paragraph breaks in the novella to help guide one’s reading. There are frequent lapses into other languages, as well as a constant stream of historical and artistic allusions. As an example, the narrator returns again and again to the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s famous observation that pushpin (a pub game) is as good as poetry if the amount of pleasure is equal, and from there tends to link the word “pushpin” to Pushkin, referring to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.

The narrator compares himself to his own documents, his skin parchment thin from medicine and held together by staples. His only refuge is the work that he is trying to complete: “hallucinations took place in the head, in the mind, now everything out there is the hallucination and the mind where the work is done is the only reality.” The novella ends much as it began, but the very act of communicating—the direct address to the reader, something Gaddis never attempted in his earlier novels—becomes its own message, its own grasp at hope and continuity in the face of bitter finality.

Next

William Gaddis Long Fiction Analysis

Loading...