As Moses Herzog sits in the Chicago police station after crashing his rental car, the narrator of Saul Bellow's work angrily exclaims, " Do you see Moses? the narrator e the main character. I would argue that this unclear division occurs because these two figures, the narrator and Herzog, are actually the same person. There are little logistical hints in the text that this is true much broader between Herzog and the narrator. In the broadest sense, the uncertainty, the subjectivity that the narrator displays in telling Herzog's story shows how similar he is to the character he is describing. In the end, even the quote that opens this article, the observation that seemingly creates the strongest division between the narrator and Herzog, is proof that these two figures are indeed one and the same – that Herzog is indeed telling his own story. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The most visible element of the book that suggests some confusion between the narrator and Herzog is the narrator's confusing use of the pronoun for Herzog. At times, the narrator confusingly refers to Herzog not in the third person as "he", but instead in the first person as "I", apparently adopting Herzog's voice. Sometimes this seems like a stylistic device, as when the narration is given in Herzog's voice, directly after Herzog's letters. Herzog writes to Madeleine's mother, Tennie, before thinking about what he has just written: "It's in the vault, in Pittsfield. Too heavy to transport to Chicago. I'll return it, of course. Soon. I've never been able to resist." to valuables - silver, gold" (31) The narration here, which directly follows the italicized one-letter words, is given in Herzog's first-person voice. The use of I eliminates the need for the narrator to use the awkward phrase "thought", when the identity of the thinker is quite clear in many other places in the text, where the narrator uses the first person to convey Herzog's thoughts, the change is not easily explained by stylistic concerns. The narrator goes forward, constantly referring to Herzog in the third person, and then suddenly, in delivering one of Herzog's thoughts or feelings, slips into the first person. The narrator makes one of these changes in describing Sono's memories of Moses: "He went to slide the water. He heard her singing as she sprayed lilac salts and body wash power. I wonder who's scrubbing it now." (173). At one point the narrator goes so far as to switch to the first person in the middle of a sentence for no immediately clear reason. After his arrival on Martha's Vineyard, his host Libbie and her husband Sissler cares for him, “Sissler was trying to make Moses feel at home – I must seem obviously shaken” (96) Such sudden changes to the first person after calling Herzog Moses or him, obscure the identity of the narrator. The Is the narrator a third-person narrator with direct access to the minutiae of Herzog's thoughts, a narrator who uses the first person to avoid awkward attribution clauses? Or is the narrator actually Herzog, who refers to himself in the third person for the most of the time in trying to gain perspective on one's life, in any case, it is unclear what perspective to take in this storynarrator regarding his own identity - his inability to choose a single perspective from which to see the story - is one of the main characteristics of the story. narrator who marks him as Herzogiano. Herzog is a character whose uncertainty about his own identity causes him to allow others to provide him with an identity. When he marries Madeleine, she convinces him that the professor's life is not the right one for him, leading him to resign his professorship and move with her to the hills of Massachusetts. By taking this step, "she also showed a taste and talent for danger and extremism, for heterodoxy, for trials", (6) not surprisingly, all qualities that Madeleine respects. He easily misses many of the professor's worries and instead becomes obsessed with the task of fixing up his house in Ludeyville, as Madeleine wishes. Ramona, his romantic interest during the time of the narrative, has a similar transformative effect on Moses' identity. . She wants him to be a sexy intellectual figure, and makes this explicit when they go shopping together: "'You should use a little imagination about clothes - encourage certain aspects of your character" (158). When Herzog is away from Ramona he is extremely 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 second thoughts he tells her, "I belong to you, Ramona!" (204). Herzog becomes trapped in someone else's idea of ​​who he is, and as a result allows his identity to change, if only for a spell. Herzog admits the change in his identity when he talks to Ramona: "While in New York I am the man inside, in Chicago I am the man on the street" (199). Herzog's tendency to change identities is similar to the tendency the narrator displays in his changing perspective on the story. Assuming Herzog is telling this story, it makes sense that he would move between different perspectives of himself. Sometimes he saw himself like others (i.e. in the third person), and sometimes he saw himself as he does when he is 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 due to his protestations of not understanding Herzog. The narrator often asks questions that show an incomplete understanding of Herzog. In the first pages of the book the narrator wonders: "his ex-wife, Madeleine, had spread the rumor that his sanity had collapsed. Was it true?" (2). But, in reality, one of Herzog's most obvious traits is his own lack of understanding of himself. In the first line of the book Herzog demonstrates his uncertainty that his sanity has collapsed: “If I'm out of my mind, everything's fine with me, Moses Herzog thought” (1). Since Herzog makes this statement in the indefinite conditional, it seems perfectly reasonable that if Herzog were the narrator he would ask himself this. Moses' awareness of his often shifting identity, which we have already discussed, further demonstrates that Herzog has little understanding of himself. At one point Herzog thinks to himself, "Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live according to more coherent ideas" (279). But he says this with the clear implication that he has so far failed to live according to a coherent system. It makes perfect sense that Herzog would frustratedly proclaim his inability to understand himself, given the arduous process he went through trying to find a stable identity. The fact that Herzog doesn't understand himself also provides a compelling explanation for why he would. chooses to tell his own story. There are numerous moments in the text in which Herzog's tendency to address topics he does not understand is noted; Thisit is stated most clearly when Herzog realizes about himself: “I prefer to accept as a motive not what I fully understand, but what I partially understand” (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 acknowledges when recalling his Jewish childhood, "I would never grasp the Christian and Faustian world" (234). Since Goethe's character, Faust, is one of the great triumphs of the Romantic world, Herzog now admits that he could never have understood either of the two elements that his book Romanticism and Christianity explicitly talked about. He undoubtedly 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 narrating it. Since the novel ends and begins at more or less the same time, we know that the narrator is not telling the story as it unfolds, but instead is telling it from a point in time after it happened. The narrator is therefore at some point after the last moment of the book. After the final moments of the book, Herzog is in a position where writing his own story would make perfect sense. At the end of the book, Herzog has given up on his letter-writing campaign. He also abandoned his unfinished academic manuscript. We know, however, that Herzog is a man of letters, and compulsively so. He always transferred his letter-writing efforts from one medium to another. He needs something to write about that is as inexplicable as Christianity or romance. Given his confused understanding of himself, he provides the perfect subject for such a work. The strange subjectivity of the narrator in some places can only be explained by the fact that Herzog is the narrator. Over the course of 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 attempting to explain Nachman's action, the narrator is uncertain, but surmises that "almost certainly, Nachman ran away from the power of his old friend's memory" (132). At this point, the narrator refers to both Herzog's memory of Nachman's dead girlfriend, Laura, and Herzog's memory of the debt Nachman owes Herzog. But at the end of the chapter, the narrator is able to revisit Nachman's escape and conclude that "[Laura] had committed suicide, and Nachman ran away because (who could blame him) he would have to tell Moses everything" (149). The narrator comes to understand Nachman. What happens that allows him to do this? The only thing that happens between the narrator's moment of uncertainty and the moment of conclusion is that Moses relives the trauma of his childhood. He relives the night his father came home after being attacked and beaten by his business partner, making Herzog realize how difficult it is to relive those moments. This is the kind of personal and emotional fulfillment that allows you to empathically understand others in the same position. Herzog's reliving of his own trauma would have allowed him to understand why Nachman would run away so as not to have to relive the trauma of losing Laura. But this type of emotional fulfillment – ​​empathy – is not transferable. When a son falls in love, a father is not inclined to see life through the same rose-colored glasses. Likewise, Herzog having this emotional experience would not allow the narrator to empathize with Nachman and therefore understand him. But that's how it is. The narrator is, and would only be able to use Herzog's emotional intelligence in the.