SOURCE: “Anti-Individualism and the Fictions of National Character in Wyndham Lewis’ Tarr,” in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 40, No. 2, Summer, 1994, pp. 226-55.

In the following excerpt, Peppis identifies themes and motifs in Lewis's novel Tarr.

No reader of Tarr, Wyndham Lewis's first-published, most-studied, and arguably best novel, can ignore the central role that nationality plays in the text. As Lewis's international characters interact chaotically on the streets and in the cafés of pre-war Paris, they spend endless time contemplating their “national” characteristics and justifying their actions in terms of “national character.” They make so much of these topics, in fact, that ever since Tarr's first publication critics have periodically taken them as pivotal to the novel's meaning. Most such analyses have focused on the psychological drama of the two German characters: Bertha Lunken, the over-sentimental lover of the English painter Frederick Tarr, and Otto Kreisler, the failed...