Moses Herzogs Confused Identity Essay -- Literature Narration Papers

Moses Herzogs Confused Identity While Moses Herzog sits in the Chicago police ship after he has crashed his rental car, the storyteller of Saul Bellows work exclaims angrily, See Moses? We dont know one a nonher (299). This is the lone moment in the book where the narrator explicitly suggests some separation between himself and Herzog. Much of the rest of the novel provides an unclear division between the narrator and the main character. I would argue that this unclear division occurs because these devil figures, the narrator and Herzog, are in fact the same person. There are vitiated logistical hints in the text that this is true. except 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 just how similar he is to the character he is describing. In the end even the quote that began this paper, the remark tha t ostensibly creates the strongest division between the narrator and Herzog, is evidence that these two figures are rattling the same - that Herzog is really narrating his own story. The most 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, such as when the narration is given in Herzogs voice, directly after Herzogs letters. Herzog writes to Madeleines mother 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 is, 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 question 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 define him as a character.