Saul Bellow: The Victim (1947)

Saul Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, is an exploration of the aporia of ethical responsibility, of the indeterminable limits of the Self’s responsibility for the Other. Although Bellow did not achieve a significant stylistic breakthrough until his next novel, The Adventures of Augie March, The Victim, with its strong echoes of Dostoyevsky and Kafka, works well enough as a refined take on the modern narrative of urban alienation and psychological disquiet. While his wife is away visiting family, Asa Leventhal, “an editor of a small trade magazine in lower Manhattan,” suffers on his own through an intensively hot New York City summer. Emotionally reserved in public and deeply paranoid, Leventhal persistently experiences anxiety in his interactions with others. For example, at the novel’s beginning, Leventhal tries to help the sick child of his brother’s wife, whom his brother has left alone in the city while working elsewhere. Although Leventhal believes he is fulfilling his ethical “duty” in getting the child sent to a hospital, he also guiltily fears that the child’s mother blames him for taking the boy out of her home and care. As a Jew, Leventhal is exposed to anti-Semitism in the workplace, from the Italian mother of his brother’s wife, and even at parties with friends. Leventhal’s paranoia is therefore compounded by his sensitivity to the widespread hostility toward the Jewish race. The novel makes only a few allusions to the Holocaust, but Leventhal’s persecution complex is clearly influenced by his comprehension of the dangerously unsure position of Jews in society. Earlier in his life, Leventhal made a series of bad decisions that led him into poverty and nearly ruined him. At one point he worked as a clerk at a flophouse, where he witnessed the deepest levels of destitution and human misery. When he later reflects on his luck in regaining a respectable position, what he observed at that job haunts him: “He had almost fallen in with that part of humanity of which he was frequently mindful . . . the part that did not get away with it – the lost, the outcast, the overcome, the effaced, the ruined.” This abject humanity, however, one day unexpectedly and uncomfortably imposes itself on Leventhal and punctures his complacency. While walking by himself in the summer heat, Leventhal encounters an uncannily familiar stranger who confronts and begins to speak to him. Leventhal recognizes the stranger as Kirby Allbee, a man he had known many years before. Allbee’s unanticipated verbal attack startles Leventhal: “Leventhal suddenly felt that he had been singled out to be the object of some freakish, insane process, and for an instant he was filled with dread.” It quickly becomes clear that Allbee, who appears to be a homeless alcoholic, holds Leventhal completely responsible for his impoverished state, claiming, “I say you’re entirely to blame, Leventhal.” He argues that Leventhal cost him his job, his wife, and just about everything else when Leventhal fought with a powerful boss that Allbee had arranged Leventhal to meet for a job interview. Allbee is casually and habitually racist, regularly dropping anti-Semitic remarks to Leventhal about the characteristics of “you people,” though he doesn’t come across as being especially harmful or as having particularly bad intentions. Allbee once made fun of a Jewish friend of Leventhal’s who badly sang traditional Jewish songs at a party, and it is this incident that led Allbee to believe Leventhal sought out revenge and deliberately ruined him. Leventhal of course is startled by these accusations and tries to avoid any admission of responsibility, despite his doubts about his unconscious motives in the past, so this first encounter ends quickly. Alcoholism provides Leventhal a convenient explanation for Allbee’s downfall, but when seeking advice from a friend Leventhal discovers that this friend also believes he is responsible. As time passes, Leventhal finds it increasingly difficult to avoid feeling a sense of obligation toward Allbee, and his psyche is persecuted by Allbee’s charge: “You try to put all the blame on me, but you know it’s true that you’re to blame. You and you only. For everything.” Initially appearing as opposites, the lucky and the unlucky, the victimizer and victimized, Leventhal and Allbee begin to mirror and double each other, with the former even adopting the latter’s drunken excesses. So when Allbee tracks Leventhal down to his home, Leventhal eventually offers him a place to stay for a few days. Allbee, however, pushes beyond the limits of Leventhal’s “hospitality,” leading to a violent final confrontation followed by an ambiguous reversal of fortunes in the final chapter. Throughout the novel, Bellow doesn’t offer any easy solution to this singular burden of ethical responsibility that Allbee places on Leventhal: “In a general way, anyone could see that there was great unfairness in one man’s having all the comforts of life while another had nothing. But between man and man, how was this to be dealt with? Any derelict panhandler or bum might buttonhole you on the street and say, ‘The world wasn’t made for you any more than it was for me, was it?’ The error in this was to forget that neither man had made the arrangements, and so it was perfectly right to say, ‘Why pick on me? I didn’t set this up any more than you did.’ Admittedly there was a wrong, a general wrong. Allbee, on the other hand, came along and say ‘You!’ and that was what was so meaningless.”