Preview of The Recognitions Summary:

Like T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), The Recognitions is one of several major works in American literature that concerns an individual trying to survive in a civilization that is rapidly falling apart. Wyatt Gwyon, himself no moral hero, reflects the state of his world in his struggle to accept his religious heritage and to realize his artistic yearnings in this atheistic and pragmatic modern age. Gwyon, like all the characters in The Recognitions, both rejects and seeks desperately to find some sort of salvation in an apparently godless world.

Gaddis also develops several other themes. Reflecting a world which lacks a proper moral exemplar, Gwyon's friend, Otto Pivner, must come to terms with living without his father, a theme that runs through much of American literature as well as Gaddis's three novels. Elements of alchemy crop up repeatedly. On the more representative level, a Faustian strain runs...