SOURCE: Davis, Michael. “Unraveling Ravelstein: Saul Bellow's Comic Tragedy.” Perspectives on Political Science 32, no. 1 (winter 2003): 26-31.

In the following essay, Davis discusses Ravelstein as a comic tragedy.

Ravelstein begins with the word “odd”; it introduces a reflection on the amusing character of the benefactors of mankind. If this beginning is, as advertised, a “clever or wicked footnote” (2), its clever wickedness surely must consist in making us think of Abe Ravelstein as an exemplar of this oddity.¹ A page later the narrator of the novel, Chick, says of the man he is memorializing, “Ravelstein was one of those large men—large, not stout” (3). This proves to be Ravelstein's leitmotif. “He was very tall” (4) (especially compared to his father who was a “fat neurotic little man” [17]). Ravelstein, a “tall pin- or chalk-striped dude with his bald head” (19) was “as big as any of [Michael Jackson's] body guards” (28). “This large Jewish...