"Americans! Look at them. Americans—Greeks, Serbs, Poles, Russians, Mexicans, Armenians, Germans, Negroes, Swedes, Spaniards, Basques, Portuguese, Italians, Jews, French, English, Scotch, Irish—look at them. Listen to them!"
Ultimately, this joyous celebration of the influence of the immigration on American—creating it and sustaining—is what the message of the novel is all about: interconnectedness and interdependency.
“I don’t expect you to understand anything I’m telling you. But I know you will remember this—that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world—no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.”
Homer’s mother deals out her philosophy of life early on and it also stands a testament to the underlying message of the novel which is later reflected in Mr. Spangler’s rhapsody on diversity. The world, Mrs. Macauley, reminds us is full of great people and those great people, Mr. Spangler adds, are not monopolized by any one particular group.
“Let me find one man uncorrupted, so that I may believe and live.”
One of the most touching moments in the novel occurs when a desperate young at the end of his rope tries to rob Mr. Spangler at gunpoint, and Spangler talks him out of this dark situation by treating him with complex compassion and understanding. The young man is so overcome by this display of humanity in a world which has seemed so lacking in that quality to him of late that he had reached a state where he was convinced there was not one single person left uncorrupted, but his desire to believe this was not so permeated so deeply that he knew if he could ever just come across one true and decent soul, everything could still be changed. Mr. Spangler—Mr. Diversity himself—becomes that man.
The force of brutality had been tempered and sweetened by the greater force of gentility.
This is a description of the town of Ithaca in which the story takes place. It also serves an appropriate description of the novel itself. On the surface, The Human Comedy can appear to be almost a corny; a sentimental take on an America that if it ever existed, is long over. Closer attention, however, reveals that the brutality of the world is still present and the darkness of modern American life simmers throughout the narrative. After all, it is a story of wartime America where news of death of loved ones thousands of miles away could arrive a moment’s notice.
He had never before known fear of any kind, let alone fear such as this and it was the most difficult thing in the world for him to know what to do.
This is not a description of a powerful, muscular man or a heroic soldier returned from the front. It is a description of Ulysses Macauley, four-year-old kid brother of the story’s main protagonist, Homer. Ulysses is the very first character the reader meets and throughout the story he is presented as the embodiment of what is really the opposite of fear: curiosity. Everything Ulysses sees is endowed with the potential for wonder and being something wondrous. He is a great explorer in his own limited way; appropriately named after his mythological forebear. His first encounter with fear even comes courtesy of a prolonged, uninterrupted and almost hypnotic fascination with the very thing that inspires that fear.
