Seize the Day Literary Elements

Fiction

New York in the 1950s

Third-person omniscient narrator

Tone: anxious, despairing, tense, whiny

Mood: energetic, irritated, restless, stressed, depressed, nervous

Tommy Wilhelm is the protagonist. Dr. Tamkin, Margaret, and Maurice Venice are the antagonists.

Will Wilhelm make money on the stock market so his life does not totally implode?

Wilhelm loses his savings on the stock market.

1. Maurice’s portrayal of his credentials foreshadows the dubious dealings he engrosses in.
2. "The very shade of green of Tamkin's check looked wrong; it was a false, disheartening color" (55).

N/A

1. The Hotel Ansonia is a grand residential hotel on the Upper West Side.
2. "Love that well which thou must leave ere long" is from Shakespeare's Sonnet 73.
3. "Sunk though he be beneath the wat'ry floor" is from John Milton's Lycidas.
4. A Golden Grimes is a yellow-colored apple.
5. There are many allusions to the Great Depression and the New Deal, programs like the Works Progress Administration, and World War II.
6. The "emperor's clothes" (43) is a reference to the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, in which the emperor thinks he has on clothes but is naked.
7. Euclid is a mathematician, and Newton is a scientist (60).

The most potent imagery in the novel is that of the city—chaotic, noisy, busy, colorful. It is a place that can, for someone like Wilhelm, oppress and terrify in its magnitude and impersonality.

1. "I didn't want to leave, but I couldn't stay" (Wilhelm, talking about his marriage, 48).
2. "Even a liar might be trustworthy in some ways" (54).

N/A

1. "Hollywood" is the movie industry.

1. "the cigar was smoked out and the hat did not defend him" (11).
2. "the breath of fate breathed on me" (17).
3. "The day had been a weeping, smoky one" (55).
4. "I want to tell you, don't marry suffering" (94).
5. "...the mouth of midtown stood open" (96).