How to Measure Success
The stimulus for the narrative is business advice Duddy gets a young boy from his grandfather: “A man without land is nobody.” Equating becoming a somebody with attaining the ends, the book’s primary theme is formulated into a question: Can success be measured by accomplishing a goal if the means of that accomplishment were immoral? Duddy’s apprenticeship becomes a story that ultimately questions business advice which measures success singularly through accomplishment while leaving the means of accomplishment unaddressed as an equally deserving measuring stick. While Dudley profits from his success at attaining his end, the subsequent loss due to his means is immeasurable.
Degradation and the Dream
Many novels tells stories of men who chase after dreams so huge and likely impossible to realize that the story really becomes about the disintegration of their moral compass and character. Duddy’s land is no white whale symbolically speaking; it is a dream to pursue that is relatively small in relation to others that have wound up costing dreamers their soul. Fittingly, Duddy Kravitz doesn’t lose his entire soul in the doggedly amoral chasing of the dream. The novel is perhaps suggesting the theme that the price that must be paid for sacrificing morality is in ratio to the scope of the pursuit.
The Duality of Humankind
Duddy Kravitz is one of the poster boys for entrepreneurial spirit: he has a business model for achieving success and works hard at attaining it. He is also a poster boy for the rejection of materialism which would partially define the decade which followed the book’s publication. He may be a business success, but he’s a moral failure. What the novel makes perfectly clear throughout is that entrepreneurs and anti-materialists can both find Duddy an engaging enough character to find themselves rooting for him to succeed. Duddy stands out among other novels of this type for being a character who avoids becoming a hero and avoids becoming a villain, but, against all, odds, he even manages to avoid becoming an anti-hero. He’s just human.
