protagonist Neil Klugman is involved in a struggle to develop and preserve an
identity of his own amid different environments and conflicting impulses within
himself. Throughout the story he makes love to Brenda Patimkin and tries to find
a role for himself in society that corresponds to what he regards as his own, unique
self. In the process he loses Brenda, but he refuses to compromise and surrender
what he regards as his integrity. As a modern, liberal intellectual living in the
conservative American society of the 1950s, he identifies with a set of secular and
rationalistic values that bring him into conflict with the world around him. He
represents the third generation of a Jewish immigrant group that has experienced
great changes and transitions, and his milieu is basically working class or lower
middle class and strongly colored by traditional Jewish ethnic attitudes and customs.
He himself is a librarian with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and an assimilationist
approach to American society.1
Neil is clearly ready to break away from the life-style of the parental generation,
and when he meets Brenda, he is attracted both to her beauty and her manners.
A resident of the wealthy suburb of Short Hills, she seems to represent a different
and better world. Newark and Short Hills represent two sharply contrasted regions
in the symbolic geography of the story, and Neil tries to define his own identity
mainly in relation to these two extremes. The library where he works offers another
possibility, but at this stage Neil finds it disappointing because he cannot identify
with the "strange fellows" that are employed there and worries that he may end
up like one of them, a dusty librarian with a pale skin whose life becomes a "numbness"
and a "muscleless" devotion to his work.2 Always alert and aware of the
imperfections of his surroundings, Neil establishes a distance between himself and
his colleagues and wants to define himself in terms of his opposition to them, just
as he does in relation to his own family and, later, to that of Brenda.
In the library
he achieves such a separation by sympathizing with a little black boy who spends
hours in the art book section looking at pictures of Gauguin's Tahiti paintings. Neil
appreciates the longing of the boy for a freer and more sensuous life which is so
powerfully expressed in these colorful scenes and figures. The pictures are part of
a chain of imagery which includes a South Sea island and symbolize an alternative
life-style which Neil longs for. Though he becomes disappointed in Brenda's family,
Neil continues to dream of a better and more interesting life which may lie in store
for the two of them.5