This study will describe and compare the main characters in John Gardner's October Light, John Barth's The Floating Opera, and Philip Roth's The Counterlife. The study will consider the ways the protagonists in these novels deal with reality, life, death and suicide. Essentially, the study will argue that, despite the differences in the lifestyles, philosophies, and personalities of the three protagonists, they are finally quite comparable in terms of the ways they relate to life and death. The differences remain, but at heart each of the main characters have a cynical, skeptical, absurd, or otherwise generally negative attitude toward reality and life, and each of them are struggling in various ways to arrive at some perspective which would allow them to, at the very least, be more accepting of life and death.
On first meeting him, we might consider James Page in Gardner's novel to be a completely cynical and rageful man with no redemptive qualities whatsoever. As Gardner paints him at the beginning of the novel, Page is a man we would probably not like to meet, much less spend over four hundred pages reading about. Page is shown to be a man who has lived most of his life, has learned to be distrustful of everybody and everything, and is not about to change his ways for anybody or anything. He has blasted his sister's television for reasons which essentially comprise his views on life. He had shot it
for its endless, simpering advertising and, worse yet, its monstrously obscene games of greed, the filth of hell made visible in the world: screaming women, ravenous for refrigerators, automobiles . . . ; leering glittering-toothed monsters of ceremonies . . . vipers upon the earth, those panderers to lust, and their programs were blasphemy and high treason (Gardner 3-4).
As for the possibility of changing these or other equally toxic and hateful views: "Well, fierce and foolish opinions they might be, but he'd held them for...