Mr. Sammler’s Planet
The title might indicate the novel belongs to the genre of science fiction. Perhaps one might even intimate or extrapolate from the title that it takes place on some strange otherworldly sphere in a distant galaxy. Alas, for those entertaining such thoughts, the story is very much terrestrial. Sammler’s planet is your own. And he’s none too happy about it:
“This moon image or circular afterimage was still with him. And we know now from photographs the astronauts took, the beauty of the earth, its white and its blue, its fleeces, the great glitter afloat. A glorious planet. But wasn't everything being done to make it intolerable to abide here, an unconscious collaboration of all souls spreading madness and poison? To flush us out?”
Mr. Sammler’s Complaint
Mr. Sammler subscribes to a way of life that is best described as traditional. He holds fast to conventional notions of morality and behavior. As a result, the state of his planet during the countercultural revolution of the decade of the missions to the moon is one directly at odds with his vision of the way things should be:
“The children were setting fire to libraries. And putting on Persian trousers, letting their sideburns grow. This was their symbolic wholeness. An oligarchy of technicians, engineers, the men who ran the grand machines, infinitely more sophisticated than this automobile, would come to govern vast slums filled with bohemian adolescents, narcotized, beflowered, and `whole.’”
Mr. Sammler’s Daughter
Sammler has a daughter named Shula. She is somewhat lacking in complete mental competence. Or else she is just totally deranged. She is a major character, but is only see through the perspective of her father and is viewpoint is questionable as well, so who really knows the situation here for sure. Imagery doesn’t help define things, but it does provide evidence necessary to make the determination:
“And by extravagance, by animal histrionics, by papers pinched, by goofy business with shopping bags, trash-basket neuroses, exotic heartburn cookery she wished to implicate him and bring him back, to bind him and keep him in the world beside her. Some world! Some her! Their elevation would be joint elevation.”
Mr. Sammler’s City
New York is almost a character in itself as Sammler makes his way through the city. Soon enough it becomes at least something of a microcosm of the world as it takes on the status of the Sammler’s disposition toward the entire rest of the planet:
“New York was getting worse than Naples or Salonika. It was like an Asian, an African town, from this standpoint. The opulent sections of the city were not immune. You opened a jeweled door into degradation, from hypercivilized Byzantine luxury straight into the state of nature, the barbarous world of color erupting from beneath. It might well be barbarous on either side of the jeweled door.”
