SOURCE: Newton, Adam Zachary. “From Exegesis to Ethics: Recognition and Its Vicissitudes in Saul Bellow and Chester Himes.” South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (fall 1996): 979-1007.

In the following essay, Newton deconstructs and compares the idea of facial “recognition” in Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go and Saul Bellow's The Victim.

We were the end of the line. We were the children of the immigrants who had camped at the city's back door … we were Brownsville—Brunsvil, as the old folks said—the dust of the earth to all Jews with money, and notoriously a place that measured success by our skill in getting away from it. So that when poor Jews left, even Negroes, as we said, found it easy to settle on the margins of Brownsville.

—Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City

These were the poorest people of the South, who poured into New York City during...