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Saul Bellow's novel Seize the Day (1) represents, I believe, an extraordinary contribution to the relationship between father and son as a theme in fiction. The father-son relationship is an area of experience which the artist shares to a larger degree than he does any other kind of experience with the cultural historian, the moral philosopher, and more recently with the psychologist, particularly the psychoanalyst.
The relationship has always been the nuclear symbol for the artist-mythologist when he attempts to place himself or his race within its proper Weltanschauung. Time, in literature, defines itself as the recurrent clashing of generations. The vicissitudes of Oedipus, from the unloved infant to the reigning parricide, seem to appoint the equally tragic alternatives for all posterity to explore. The most superficial inspection, from Oedipus to old Karamazov, must convince us that what makes the relationship so apt a symbol for the historical process is that one quality it shares in equal intensity with both literature and history—unceasing conflict with atonement as its end. As for the atonement between the father and the son in whom he is well pleased, it is in actuality a pious wish, in literature a posthumous reconciliation more formative of a religious belief than a real human relationship.
Within any given epoch conditions arise which determine the outcomes of these conflicts, and certain historical periods seem to be entirely exempt from viewing the conflict as tragic. In these periods arise situations such as are dealt with in the theater of Plautus in which iuvenis outwits and conquers