#BOOKS BY EL DOCTOROW DRIVERS#

#BOOKS BY EL DOCTOROW DRIVERS#

(McCaffery 39)ĦDaniel is on a quest to fill the moral and affective void left by the execution of his parents, trying to recover truth as a substitute The book opens with a journey, with Daniel and his wife hitch-hiking, on their way to visit Susan in the psychiatric hospital.ĭaniel Lewin thumbed his way from New York to Worcester, Massachussetts the early morning traffic was wondering - I mean the early morning traffic was light, but not many drivers could pass them without wondering who they were and they were going (3) It was the characters and their complexity that moved me - the historical intersection of social and personal agony, history moving in Daniel, shaping his own pathology- Daniel breaks himself down constantly to reconcile himself to what is happening and what has happened to him. More than simply divided, Daniel is fragmented: he explores all possible positions: from extreme distance to closeness, and his narrative ranges from autobiography to history book, from journal to dissertation.

From the start his voice hesitates between “I” and “he,” 4 and he interpolates past and present. The many-faceted, polyphonic voice of the text revisits his past through different angles and positions.

4 It corresponds to the style of the biblical source which alternates between first- and third-perso (.)ĤDaniel goes through endless realignments of vision 3 that allow him to re-adjust and adapt to society.

3 This idea is clearly formulated in Doctorow’s next novel Ragtime (1975): “It was evident to him th (.).

Referring thus to this specific biblical passage stresses interpretation as a matter of life or death and, in Doctorow’s novel, Daniel, the ever-dissatisfied interpreter, lives, whereas his past-oriented and catatonic sister Susan dies.ģThis analysis describes how Daniel, from an imaginary position of mastery, starting with a wish to rehabilitate his parents, gradually comes to understand, through the process of writing, that no absolute truths are available, and thus becomes a subject. Should he fail, he risked death, for the king threatened to cut him and his friends in pieces 2. Daniel therefore needed to recreate the dream before interpreting it. The biblical character he identifies with was an interpreter of dreams for a cruel king who tended to forget his dreams. Among all the different stories composing the biblic (.)ĢDaniel Isaacson frames his narrative with The Book of Daniel: the first epigraph and the final words of the novel quote passages from the Old Testament.

2 This is Nebuchadnezzar’s threat, Chapter Two.

Daniel tries to find meaning to the void left by his parents, he is on a quest for a truth that constantly eludes him for Mindish, the only witness and main accuser at his parents’ trial, is, at the time of his writing, a senile man who spends most of his time in the fairy-tale universe of Disneyland. The novel is hard to categorize for it draws on many traditions such as the Bildungsroman, the historical novel or the essay as it is supposedly Daniel’s PhD dissertation and it springs backward and forward in time from the fifties to the sixties. Daniel’s narrative reshapes the past making central what had previously been marginalized by the dominant historical discourse.

1 Welcome to Hard Times (the western genre revisited) in 1960 and Big as Life (a science-fiction nov (.)ġIn The Book of Daniel, Doctorow’s third novel 1, published in 1971, the narrator is an orphan who tries through his narrative to rehabilitate his parents who are fictionalized re-creations of the Rosenbergs, renamed Isaacsons.

Books by el doctorow