As Moses Herzog sits at the Chicago police station after crashing his rental car, the narrator of Saul Bellow's work angrily exclaims: " See Moses? We don't know each other” (299) This is the only moment in the book where the narrator explicitly suggests some separation between himself and Herzog. Much of the rest of the novel presents a blurred division between. the narrator and the main character I would argue that this blurred division occurs because these two characters, the narrator and Herzog, are actually the same person. There are small logistical indications in the text that this is true. these small elements of the text coexist with much larger similarities between Herzog and the narrator. In the broadest sense, the uncertainty and subjectivity that the narrator demonstrates in telling Herzog's story shows how much he resembles the character. which he describes. Ultimately, even the quote that opens this article, the remark that ostensibly creates the strongest divide between the narrator and Herzog, is proof that these two characters are actually the same – that Herzog is actually telling his own story . Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The most visible element of the book that suggests confusion between the narrator and Herzog is the narrator's confusing use of the pronoun for Herzog. On occasion, the narrator confusingly refers to Herzog, not in the third person as "he", but rather in the first person as "I", apparently adopting Herzog's voice. Sometimes this seems to be a stylistic device, as when the narration is given in Herzog's voice, directly after Herzog's letters. Herzog writes to Tennie, Madeleine's mother, before reflecting on what he has just written: "It's in the safe in Pittsfield. Too heavy to carry to Chicago. I'll return it, fine sure. Little by little I could never hold on to valuables - silver, gold" (31) The narration here, which comes directly after the italicized words of a letter, is given to the first. person of Herzog. The use of I eliminates the need for the narrator to use the awkward phrase "he thought", when the identity of the thinker is quite clear. But in many other places in the text, where the narrator uses the first person to convey Herzog's idea. In our thoughts, this change is not easily explained by stylistic concerns. The narrator continues, constantly referring to Herzog in the third person, and then suddenly, while describing one of Herzog's thoughts or feelings, he switches to the first person. The narrator makes one of these changes when describing Moses' memories of Sono: "She went to run the water. He heard her singing as she sprinkled the lilac salts and the power of the bubble bath .I wonder who’s rubbing it now.” (173). In one place, the narrator goes so far as to switch to first person in the middle of a sentence for no immediately clear reason. After arriving on Martha's Vineyard, his host Libbie and her husband Sissler look after him: "Sissler was trying to make Moses feel at home – I must have looked visibly shaken" (96). Such sudden shifts to the first person after calling Herzog either Moses or him obscure the identity of the narrator. Is the narrator a third-person narrator with direct access to the details of Herzog's thoughts, a narrator who uses the first person to avoid awkward attribution clauses? Or is the narrator actually Herzog, referring to himself at thethird person most of the time to try to gain some perspective on your own life? The narrator, in any case, does not know exactly what perspective to adopt in this story. The narrator's very uncertainty about his own identity—his inability to choose a single perspective from which to view the story—is one of the narrative's main features. narrator who marks him as Herzogian. Herzog is a character whose uncertainty about his own identity prompts him to allow others to provide him with an identity. When he marries Madeleine, she convinces him that the life of a professor is not right for him, leading him to resign from his teaching position and move with her to the hills of Massachusetts. By acting in this way, “he showed a taste and a talent also for danger and extremism, for heterodoxy, for trials” (6), no, in fact, all qualities that Madeleine respects. He easily loses many of the professor's concerns and instead becomes obsessed with the task of repairing his Ludeyville house, as Madeleine wishes. Ramona, his romantic interest during the narrative's time period, has a similarly transformative effect on Moses' identity. . She wants him to be a sexy intellectual figure, and she makes this explicit when they go shopping together: "'You should show a little imagination in matters of clothing - encourage certain aspects of your character" ( 158). When Herzog is away from Ramona, he is acutely aware of her efforts to change him, but when he is with her, he submits. This is captured when the two are in bed together. Ramona begs Herzog: "Tell me you belong to me. Tell me!" Without hesitation, he told her: “I belong to you, Ramona!” (204). Herzog allows himself to be caught up in someone else's idea of ​​himself and therefore allows his identity to change, if only for a moment. Herzog admits his own identity shift when speaking to Ramona: "While in New York I'm the man on the inside, in Chicago I'm the man on the street." (199). Herzog's tendency to change his identity is similar to the tendency the narrator shows in his changing perspective on the story. Assuming Herzog is telling this story, it makes sense that he would switch between perspectives of himself. He sometimes viewed himself as others did (i.e., in the third person), and sometimes as he viewed himself when alone (i.e., in the first person). As the opening quote of this essay demonstrates, the narrator seems to refute the idea that he and Herzog could be the same person because of his protests that he does not understand Herzog. The narrator frequently asks questions that show an incomplete understanding of Herzog. In the opening pages of the book, the narrator asks: “His ex-wife, Madeleine, had spread the rumor that his mental health had collapsed. Was it true? (2). But in reality, one of Herzog's most obvious traits is his own lack of self-understanding. In the first line of the book, Herzog demonstrates his own uncertainty about whether his mental health has collapsed: "If I'm crazy, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog" (1). Because Herzog makes this statement in the indefinite conditional, it seems entirely reasonable that if Herzog were the narrator, he would ask this question of himself. Moses' awareness of his ever-changing identity, which we have already discussed, further demonstrates that Herzog has little understanding of himself. At one point, Herzog reflects, “A large part of my life has been devoted to the effort to live according to more coherent ideas” (279). But he says this with the clear implication that so far he has notfailed to live according to a coherent system. It makes perfect sense that Herzog would frustratingly proclaim his inability to understand himself, given the arduous process he went through trying to find a stable identity. The fact that Herzog does not understand himself also provides a compelling explanation for why he would understand himself. chooses to tell his own story. There are many moments in the text where we see Herzog's tendency to approach subjects he does not understand; this is expressed most clearly when Herzog realizes about himself: “I prefer to accept as a motive not the thing which I fully understand but the thing which I understand in part” (194). Although not explicitly stated, a close reading of the text reveals that Herzog was motivated to write his first academic book about something he did not understand. The title was Romanticism and Christianity, and as he admits when remembering his own Jewish childhood, "I would never understand the Christian and Faustian world" (234). Given that Goethe's character of Faust is one of the great triumphs of the Romantic world, Herzog admits at this point that he could never understand either of the two elements that his book Romanticism and Christianity was explicitly about. Without a doubt, he chose to write this book because he did not understand these ideas. Likewise, Herzog's lack of understanding of himself explains why Herzog chose to tell his own story. The temporal arrangement of the book also supports the idea that Herzog is telling it. Because the novel ends and begins at roughly the same time, we know that the narrator is not telling the story as it unfolds, but rather telling it at some point after the fact. The narrator thus finds himself at a given moment after the last moment of the book. After the final moments of the book, Herzog finds himself in a position where writing his own story would make perfect sense. By the end of the book, Herzog has given up on his letter campaign. He also abandoned his unfinished academic manuscript. However, we know that Herzog is a man of letters, and compulsively so. He always transferred his letter writing efforts from one medium to another. He needs to write about something as unexplained as Christianity or Romanticism. Given his confused understanding of himself, he is the ideal subject for such a work. The strange subjectivity of the narrator at times can only be explained by the fact that Herzog is the narrator. During one chapter, the narrator comes to a conclusion about Nachman, Herzog's childhood friend. At the beginning of the chapter, Nachman runs away from Herzog. In trying to explain Nachman's action, the narrator is uncertain, but guesses that "almost certainly, Nachman fled the power of his old friend's memory" (132). At this point, the narrator refers to both Herzog's memory of Nachman's deceased girlfriend, Laura, as well as Herzog's memory of the debt Nachman owed Herzog. But at the end of the chapter, the narrator is able to look back on Nachman's escape and conclude that "[Laura] had committed suicide and Nachman fled because (who could blame him) he should have told everything to Moses.” (149). The narrator comes to understand Nachman. What is going on that allows him to do this? The only thing that happens between the narrator's moment of uncertainty and his moment of conclusion is that Moses relives the trauma of his own childhood. He relives the night his father came home after being attacked and beaten by his business partner. Herzog thus realizes how difficult it is to relive such moments. It is the kind of personal and emotional realization that allows us to empathically understand the.