Moses Herzogs Confused Identity Essay -- Literature Narration Papers

Moses Herzogs Conf using upd identity element While Moses Herzog sits in the Chicago police station after he has crashed his rental car, the storyteller of Saul Bellows work exclaims angrily, See Moses? We dont know champion another (299). This is the lone moment in the book where the cashier explicitly suggests some separation amidst himself and Herzog. Much of the rest of the novel provides an undecipherable division between the narrator and the main character. I would argue that this unclear division occurs because these ii figures, the narrator and Herzog, atomic number 18 in fact the equal mortal. There are small logistical hints in the text that this is true. still these small elements of the text exist alongside much larger similarities between Herzog, and the narrator. In the largest sense, the uncertainty, the subjectivity that the narrator evinces in telling Herzogs story shows expert how similar he is to the character he is describing. In the end til now the quote that began this paper, the remark that ostensibly creates the strongest division between the narrator and Herzog, is indorse that these two figures are really the same - that Herzog is really narrating his own story. The or so visible element of the book that suggests some conflation of the narrator and Herzog is the narrators confused pronoun use for Herzog. On occasion, the narrator confusingly refers to Herzog not in the third person as he but instead in the first person as I, seemingly adopting Herzogs voice. Some of the times that this happens, it seems a stylistic device, much(prenominal) as when the narration is given in Herzogs voice, directly after Herzogs letters. Herzog writes to Madeleines start Tennie, before thinking about what he has just written Its in the vault, in Pitts... ...rose colored glasses. Similarly, Herzog having this emotional experience would not allow the narrator to empathize with, and thus understand Nachman. But it does. The narrator i s, and would only be able to utilize Herzogs own emotional intelligence in narrating the story, because the narrator is Herzog. The confused pronoun references throughout the text strongly suggest that the narrator and Herzog are one. But the less overt moments, where the reader is brought to see the emotional closeness of Herzog and the narrator, are the truly convincing signals that these two figures are one. Even the disbelief that ostensibly sets the two figures apart, in fact contains many of the similarities between the two figures. When Moses tells himself, See Moses? We dont know one another, Moses is, in fact, keeping with all the uncertainties that typeset him as a character.