Seize the Day: A Success Story of a Failed Life.
Sometimes in human life there comes a time when everything starts to fail, the lie becomes more obvious than the truth. Loneliness became more apparent at a time when life’s calculations were confusing. Everyone becomes a judge in front of the man standing on the fence of life, but does not stand by his side with warmth and sympathy.
When the ratio of success to failure is measured by family and social criteria, then the wounds of the heart are not measured, the jokes made with life are not measured. The story of such a lonely, lonely life is told in the short novel ‘Seize the Day’ by the Canadian-born English writer Saul Bellow.
But it is not just a story of failure, it is a story of overcoming all the so-called failures and mechanics of the modern world, liberating people from the deep sense of life, liberating them from worldly trivialities and realizing the greatest truth of life.
The novel revolves around the one-day life of the protagonist Tommy Wilhelm, but it is as if Tommy’s whole life is portrayed in that one-day picture – his problems, loneliness, aspirations and failures. And through the depiction of Tommy’s life, the author seems to have highlighted the ugly side of the false civilization of the modern world. He showed how the propensity and competition in the name of civilization is constantly deceiving every human being in all spheres, from personal to family and social life.
The story begins when Tommy goes to the lobby on the 23rd floor of a hotel in New York to collect his letters. Just then he began to feel as if the elevator was going down uncontrollably, a scene that seemed to symbolize Tommy’s life. Not just Tommy, it seems to show metaphorically how we think a lot about our lives, but in the end life goes where it should go.
If the question is, which aspect of Tommy’s life is most clearly revealed in the book? Surely the answer would be his loneliness or the helpless loneliness of the modern man behind Tommy, where man simply finds a little true love, affection, sincerity, the absolute warmth of heart. Let the world judge man now only by his achievements, only by his ability. The individual, the individual heart is there as if unwanted, neglected.
This is how the emptiness of human heart, the unspoken cry of human beings is being created for ages. Not just Tommy, every picture in the book says the same thing, every character wanders alone in his own world.
Tommy’s father, Dr. Adler, whose thoughts are all about himself, can’t even think of his wife and children as part of his life. Money, finances, the pursuit of so-called success have robbed him of the ability to understand his child’s helplessness or to love his child as a father. Isn’t his successful father more helpless than the failed Tommy? At least Tommy holds all the affections of his children in his heart.
The famous American Marxist analyst Frederick Jameson has said about the mechanical form of modern capitalist society that capitalism is unknowingly erasing true emotions from us with its lies. “Capitalism unknowingly results in the lack of authentic emotion” – this is the family system shown in the book.
In a family where almost everyone evaluates each other by their earnings, occupations and achievements, where less money and less establishment is a source of shame for one another, using each other for economic and social security, there is little room left for affection and compromise. For emotional matters. The father is scared every day, when I know the son wants to sit on his shoulder, the son who has failed in his professional life as a mother and sister is not a threat to their social dignity, Rose in this novel and in the real world outside of the novel.
The ups and downs of Tommy’s life bring us another aspect of capitalist society. Let it be clear how this society and regime is further exploiting the exploited under the guise of masks. The reader sees how Tommy loses everything when he tries to trust a patriarchal friend, the reader learns how his wife only exploits him even though their marriage breaks up.
But the most perfect picture of this entangled society emerges when it is seen that the father deliberately neglects and fails to save the child even after realizing the deception that is about to take place, and even refuses to give shelter to the ruined son.
Lost in the glare of Hollywood, Tommy Wilhelm’s life could have ended in a dark hole of despair and failure. Tommy, seeking to escape the cruel, senseless, mechanical city, may have sought peace in the stillness of death. But a different ending to the novel makes Tommy’s story not a story of defeat, but a story of winning life, and the reader becomes acquainted with the author’s incomparable writing talent.
While reading the book, the reader will hear the story of failure with the destruction of life at the beginning and at the end you will hear how many small incidents, how little one day can change a person’s whole life in a moment. When Tommy, tormented from all walks of life, carries the burden of his cursed life on the streets of the city like a madman, the fate of a stranger’s life explains to him that, contrary to all visible truths, there is the greatest unseen truth of human life. , Yet so-so life, so-so saves people from hiding.
The name of that truth is hope, the name of the bearer of that invisible life is faith. The hope and faith of the poor hero’s suddenly found life turns the novel around. The reader who is lost in the combination of all the bitter, rough truths of the world with the hero should also appear with the hero in front of the most beautiful flower of life – the flower of hope, the flower of love that survives on faith and belief.
From this realization, a man of the world has fallen in love with another stranger with his heart for ages, tears have flowed for the unknown soul. What could be a bigger success in a very small human life! What could be more beautiful in life!
