ABSTRACT
More Die of Heartbreak came into focus, Bellow tells us, “when it struck me all at once that certain subjects, which in the past were treated very seriously, are now the subject of teasing and parody. . . . [A] lot of the things that used to mean so much to us-love, murder, family relations-have been emptied of meaning and feeling. Now they are toyed with purely as a mental game.” This condition derives, in his view, from the nihilism resulting from World War I. Bellow says that in More Die of Heartbreak he “was really after how . . . serious people hold their own against this nihilism” (Sanoff 52). One may wonder why this perspective struck him “all at once,” since, except for the toying, it is a familiar one in his work. He had earlier, for example, described Humboldt’s Gift as “a presumptuous book which attempts to make a comedy of death” (Bragg 676) and had spoken eloquently some time before that of our special comedy in which introspection, so solemnly treated in earlier literature, is now differently seen, citing Nabokov’s reworking of the Death-in-Venice theme in Lolita as an example. His own Henderson the Rain King and Herzog are equally relevant instances (“Literature” 173ff.).
