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The Bonfire of the Vanities

In his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe brings to fiction the same reporter's eye that served him as a journalist over a long career. In a review in the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Buckley stated that Wolfe himself had said that there are no villains in the novel, but Buckley states that the book seems filled with villains because it "teems with the vain, the greedy, the soulless, the self-important, the envious." Buckley is right in his characterization of the characters inhabiting this novel, but he is wrong that this means the novel has a villain. More correctly, he is wrong that the novel has a human villain. An examination of the novel shows that there is no human hero and no human villain in this novel, but there is both a hero and a villain of a different sort. The hero is New York City itself, which is a hero in the sense of being the protagonist of the novel rather than of being a shining example to others or a model of courage. The villain is what is often referred to derisively as The System, which in this case includes the government, the social structure, the racial and class divisions in the city, and especially the legal system, which stands as the primary villain in this book.

The closest thing to a human hero in the novel is Sherman McCoy, and he truly has feet of clay. He does become more radicalized as the novel progresses, but he never overcomes The System. His heroism comes in challenging it and in defying it, but he never rises as high as a hero. He is an upper class WASP who works on Wall Street, and for most of the novel all he thinks about is himself. He has been cheating on his wife for some time, and he depends on the wife because his position in society derives from her. He makes a great deal of money at his firm, but she has more money and better connections. Yet, he cheats on her and betrays his family, and the conflict he faces in the novel is that he is about to get caught...

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The Bonfire of the Vanities. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:14, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701864.html