" (p.15) but his father cannot stop criticizing his son, even the way Tommy eats and looks at the breakfast table. Just like the camera was critical of Tommy, so is the unsparing gaze of his father. His father continues to call him by his old name, Wilky, which Tommy has rejected. Tommy, once attractive enough to solicit the attention of a Hollywood scout, has become overweight and lethargic, and has trouble breathing because of the great, oppressive weight of the past that is now pressing down upon him. Rather than being reborn anew, Tommy is drowning in the sea of misery he has created for himself.
Erasing his father by changing his name, fleeing back to his father -- nothing works. Tommy says that he fears he will spend "second half" of "life recovering from the mistakes of the first half," but really this attempt to start anew is a familiar one, as he again tries to merely change external aspects of his self. (p. 100) Money, power, fame, if Tommy can just secure one of these things, or preferably all of these things, he is convinced that he will be reborn as his true self and triumph over his father's control and will. But by making societal and fatherly approval the nexus of his life, Tommy is just treading water, effectively standing still, emotionally.
For his entire existence, Tommy says, he has felt like an outsider, "everyone seems to know something" except him, he remarks, a feeling that still plagues him as he engages in fruitless speculation in the commodities market, again seeking to make money quickly and easily. (p. 78) at first, he rejects the assertion that his true sense of self is "inescapable," and believes that money, motion, and name changing will free him from who he is, so long as he can prove his worth in the seemingly infinitely fluid social space that is America. After being rejected in California, he decides that "people were feeble...
(p.49)
The truth is that, just as Tommy wished to become an actor, someone who has a profession being someone else, he is still trying to be someone he is not, acting as if his persona were as fluid as an actor's before a camera. Even his old sales job required him to lie, and to exist only to please others. In fact, Tommy is proud of his ability to lie and dissemble at the beginning of the novel because he sees it as his potential source of salvation: "When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow. So at least he thought and there was a certain amount of evidence to back him up. He had once been an actor -- no, not quite, an extra -- and he knew what acting should be." (p.3)
But when Tommy cries at the novels end, and is awash in real tears, not merely pretending to cry, or drowning in his sorrows, he realizes that through truthfulness he has reached a real epiphany as a human being, and he has an existence beyond his father's son, or what he is able to construct through such narrow and superficial trappings as fame and money. Only when Tommy accepts that success is not a stable, fixed point, but that life is living in the moment, and enjoying who he is in the present, does he realize what true happiness is -- happiness is not gaining societal esteem or attempting to make one's self over again in a dramatic fashion. Rather, it is experiencing authentic emotions, in a quiet, but steadfast fashion. Only by generating tears that come from within his soul does Tommy really become reborn as Tommy, not Wilky.
Works Cited
Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day. Originally published 1957. New York: Penguin Reissue,
