Mr. Sammler's Planet

Despite the fact that the protagonist Artur Sammler visits the past, present, and future in Saul Bellow's novel Mr. Sammler's Planet, Sammler is stuck spiritually and emotionally in a sort of "dead zone" which transcends time altogether. Because of the suffering he has witnessed and experienced, particularly in the Holocaust, Sammler has become a man for whom human feeling and spirituality is apparently inaccessible for the most part. Of course, we cannot blame Sammler for this condition, whether he chooses it or whether it is simply a survival mechanism. He is behaving in a way quite compatible with any individual who had undergone his horrific experiences.

As Sammler says to himself at a point halfway through the novel: "Too many inside things were ruptured. To some people, true enough, experience seemed wealth. Misery worth a lot. Horror a fortune. Yes. But I never wanted such riches" (141). It is not surprising to find that Sammler has different ways of responding to a life of such pain, and that he deals with his suffering in different ways which are related to his attitudes toward and reflections on the past, present and future. Of course, these time divisions are not so simple, for Sammler is an intelligent man with a still-agile mind which nimbly skips from past to future to present, again and again.

For example, he is remembering one moment about fighting in World War II and killing a man in order to live, an action from which he derives an eerie pleasure:

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ly great prize of power was unobstructed enjoyment of murder. . . . Sammler tied his shoelaces---continued dressing. He brushed at his hair. Trancelike (144). Of course, in a sense, Sammler has willed himself---contemplated himself---into such a trancelike state of pure consciousness, a paradox which allows him to slip from past to present to future in order to face what he face in his mind but not so uninterruptedly that he goes entirely mad. Considering Sammler's past and his resulting philosophy of life, it is not surprising to find that his views on the future are not rosy. Symbolic of the future in the book and in Sammler's life is the trip to the moon by astronauts, which is taking place in the "present" of the novel. In a long conversation with his nephew, Sammler muses on the trip to the moon. He is not incapable of considering at least the remote possibility that the future of humankind, because of the trip to the moon, might be somehow brighter, more human: So perhaps, perhaps! colonies on the moon would reduce the fever and swelling here, and the passion for boundlessness might find more material appeasement. Humankind, drunk with terror, calm itself, sober up (182). Of course, it is a whimsical, superficial, a

Category: Literature - M