Talking About Vortices to the Next Generation: Striking Similarities in the Initiation Plots of William Faulkner and Saul Bellow

Sažetak

In a peculiar short story by Saul Bellow, an elderly man tells his son of incidents from his youth dating back to his teenage years in 1933. In “Something to Remember Me By” (1990), the narrator Louie feels his son would profit from ethical instructi­on. Yet the sort of incidents he relates and the form of Bellow’s initiation plot bear striking similarities to those found in William Faulkner’s final novel entitled The Reivers (1962), written in the form of a grandfather’s legacy to his grandchild occurring back in 1905 when protagonist/narrator Lucius Priest was eleven ye­ars old, relating memories stretching fifty-seven years, the same number of years that Bellow’s Louie recalls past events. Both narrators disclose youthful indiscretions to the next generations in the hope of offering a moral compass to their betterment. In both cases, sinful mistakes in judgment become apparent to a parent or grandparent of the narrators’ youth concerning alcohol, theft and sexual humiliation in a major metropolis where the boys lose innocence and dignity. This contribution compares comic initiation fiction by two major American authors nearing the end of their fiction-writing careers and suggests that the similarities merit attention than they have heretofore not received.