This paper makes an attempt to delve deep upon the structural pattern of the novel Seize the Day by Saul Bellow. It uses Todorov’s grammar of “parts of speech” in the novel to explore the pattern through empirico-analytical mode. According to the theory of grammar, there are two essential things: proposition and sequence, in a successful narrative. The proposition should be placed in the sequence to get the structural pattern of any discourse. In the novel, the small units can be extracted through A. J. Greimas’ binaries: subject versus object, helper versus opponent, sender versus receiver. These binaries should be placed in a sequence so as to form a structure. Todorov divides the sequences into three: logical, temporal and spatial.
Seize the Day revolves around a single day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm, a middle-aged man who has not so much failed as never made good. A series of bad decisions have forced him to move to the Hotel Gloriana on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where his father, the icy Dr. Adler, refuses to offer him aid. His estranged wife makes increasingly shrill demands for money, his father refuses to carry Tommy on his back, and finally a con man bilks Tommy out of his last dollars on an ill-advised plunge in the commodities market.
The subject versus object dualism provides Tommy as the subject, involving himself in the quest for love and human value as his object. The helper versus opponent dualism is also well exploited: Tommy finds his father unkind and unsympathetic while trusting Dr. Tamkin who is a brilliant deceiver. In reality, Dr. Adler cares for Tommy while Tamkin deceives him. The sender versus receiver proposition is placed in spatial sequence, relating the parallelism between Dr. Tamkin and Dr. Adler as senders of care and advice to Tommy.
Each of the sequences is related to others in one way or another. The temporal sequence deals with time and the spatial sequence deals with parallelism of events. All the sequences form a structured cycle where the binary opposites place themselves in horizontal axes and the sequences present themselves in the vertical axes forming a paradigm.
Works Cited
- Bellow, Saul. Seize the day. Greenwich: Fawcett, 1965. Print.
- Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.
- Pinsker, Sanford. “Saul Bellow: ‘What in All of This, Speaks for Man?’” Contemporary Literary Criticism. ed. Janes P. Draper, et al. Vol. 79. Detroit: Gale, 1994. Print.
- Todorov, Tzvetan. “Structural Analysis of Narrative.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2000. 2090-106. Print.