No, literally Carpe Diem! -- Seize the Day

Now that I have recently finished the book, I now know that Wilhelm doesn’t commit suicide, but he does explodes in an incontrollable cry, where his tears keep dashing out of his eyes without him being able to suck them in. This typical human reaction to the compilation of all the misfortunes that Wilhelm has gone through is explainable with the theory I posed in my previous blog about serenity. Maybe, if Wilhelm had cried constantly by himself every day, he wouldn’t of have exploded when he saw the old man in his coffin and the funeral. “He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need” (114).

The meaning of seize the day/ carpe diem shifted completely to a literal meaning. When I finished this book and read the feedback that the “Chicago Sun—Times” in the back-cover of the book it suddenly hit me the relation between the title and the book itself. Bellow instead of trying to make his characters seize the day in a carpe diem way, he literally seized the day by describing every single detail in it from the moment it starts to the climax of it. He literally captures every moment of it; however, Bellow doesn’t only “seize” any day, he seized Tommy Wilhelm’s day. This awkward relation that the author makes with his book and the famous carpe diem phrase is basically a parody of it, it is an absurd interpretation of it. In a sense, its like interpreting literally the meaning of the phrase “you’re full of crap”.

“the mask of kindness” (90). Once again Bellow does an allusion to human’s discipline. He mentions not only kindness, but the mask of kindness. By it being a mask, it means that kindness is covering the real truth, which, in my interpretation, means being a hypocrite. By mentioning this, the author’s allusion may be towards the “hypocracy” in which humanity lives in, where humans betray and kill people from their own species. This mask of kindness is even shown by Bellow in the book through Dr. Tamkin and how he managed to defraud Wilhelm by investing his money, if he ever did, in the worst commodities of the commodities market. He was wearing the “mask of kindness” the whole time he swindled Wilhelm before he took off with his money.