Dangling Man, the first published work by Saul Bellow, testifies to the psychology of a whole generation that grew up during the Great Depression and the war. We are in 1942; Joseph is twenty-seven, lives in Chicago, and is waiting to be conscripted into the Army as a draftee. He left his job in a travel bureau and currently lives with his wife.

He has “all the time in the world,” as his mother-in-law says. This period of inactivity gives rise to a diary that spans five months of quarrels with friends and in-laws and intense self-analysis. We go through his intimate daily notes, insecurities, fears, daily habits, and conversations with his alter ego, “Tu As Raison Aussi.”

The constitutive incompetence of humankind

The long wait for enlistment, as well as Joseph’s inability to enjoy freedom, triggers a change he witnesses firsthand. To use Bellow’s own words in Dangling Man, “confronted with the inevitable shrinking of the horizons, everyone has, eventually, to face the craters of the spirits.”

Far from being isolated, though alienated from society, Joseph comes into contact with many people, all influenced by the war in different ways. What shows through Bellow’s book is the constitutive incompetence of humankind and the various weaknesses in and around us. In the end, his alter ego convinces Joseph to create his own destiny and sends him to volunteer for the army rather than continue waiting.

Lack of future in Dangling Man

Another significant topic in Dangling Man is the future, or better, the lack of it, something the writer must have known personally, as he served in the Merchant Marines during World War II.

Other books that focus on World War II, but from a more historical perspective, are In Our Time and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, The Enormous Room, by E.E. Cummings, and Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos.