Looking for Mr. Green

By Saul Bellow

07 外商二班谢佳24号

• I Introduction to the Short Story

• II Themes and Meanings

• III Style and Technique

Introduction to the story “Looking for Mr. Green” recounts the efforts of George Grebe to del

iver relief checks to handicapped residents of the South Side of Chicago. Grebe, thirty-five and an instructor of classical languages, has been reduced by the hard times of the Depression to taking a series of trivial, part-time jobs until an old schoolmate secures for him a position at the relief office. Grebe's desire to do well at his new job is hampered by its peculiar difficulty: “He could find the streets and numbers, but the clients were not where they were supposed to be.” Grebe is particularly frustrated by his inability to find Mr. Tulliver Green but persists in his search long after quitting time. As the story develops, Grebe's quest to find Mr. Green becomes a symbolic quest to find his own identity.

Grebe systematically questions a local grocer, the janitor, and several tenants of Mr. Green's building. Their responses are hostile and evasive. Grebe is viewed “as an emissary from hostile appearances” because he is not yet a familiar face in the territory and because he is white. Although Grebe himself has known hardship, he is out of place in this rundown district of the city, where he is shocked by the distrust of the people and the blighted physical setting.

In the end, Grebe finds Mr. Green's bungalow, inhabited by a heavy woman, naked and drunk, who screams furiously at him and knocks into him with her huge breasts. Grebe is shocked and embarrassed at “what he had tracked down, in his hunting game.” Although he believes Mr. Green to be upstairs, Grebe does not go up, afraid that Mr. Green will be similarly naked and drunk. Recalling Field's insistence that Grebe obtain proper identification before handing over relief checks, Grebe nevertheless gives the check to the woman, who might or might not be Mrs. Green, for “whoever she was, the woman stood for Green, whom he was not to see this time.” The story ends with Grebe elated that Mr. Green has been found. By handing over the check, Grebe does what the epigraph of the story suggests he do: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”

Themes and Meanings Grebe's search for Mr. Green becomes a search for the nature of reali

ty and, ultimately, a search for his own identity. Grebe's trek through the streets and tenements of Chicago prompts him to think about appearance and reality. “Rebuilt after the Great Fire, this part of the city was, not fifty years later, in ruins again.” Grebe comes to find that people create their own reality by consent. The El, for example, built by the financier Charles T. Yerkes, existed because people consented to its existence. They agreed to pay their ten cents to ride in its crash-box cars, so it was a success. If people created their own reality by consent, why, Grebe asks himself, should they consent to cities of misery and painful ugliness? “Because there is something that is dismal and permanently ugly?” Unable to reach any conclusions about the reality people create for themselves, Grebe returns to his own predicament—finding Mr. Green and delivering his check.

It has been established by Raynor and Field that identity in modern society is determined by money, Mr. Green essentially does not exist until Grebe delivers his check. Grebe's own identity is linked to Mr. Green's. The similarity in their names parallels a similarity of condition: Both suffer or have suffered hardships. If Mr. Green exists and Grebe is able to deliver his check, then Grebe's life is meaningful. Because the woman to whom Grebe gives the check clearly stands for Mr. Green, Grebe has proved, through delivery of the check, that the ordinary individual's life is important. “Looking for Mr. Green” embodies the major theme of Saul Bellow's fiction: People need not be passive victims of their situations but in humanity can somehow transcend alienating environments.

Writing Style Structurally, “Looking for Mr. Green” consists of two

scenes set on the streets and in the tenements of Chicago, separated by a scene at the relief agency in which a philosophical discussion between Grebe and Raynor is interrupted by a welfare mother's tirade. Within this basic structure, a number of ironies and contrasts occur. It is, for example, oddly ironic that Grebe would have trouble delivering relief checks to people who have desperate need of them.

The realistic, richly detailed characters and setting also are in contrast to the symbolic intentions of the work. The conversation in Grebe's office makes apparent that the story exists on two planes, the concrete and the symbolic. The drunken, naked woman whom Grebe meets in Mr. Green's bungalow is, for example, not only a living character but also a symbolic figure: She, like Staika, represents the misdirected human spirit. Several allusions and metaphors during the course of the work also place the story in a larger context. The walls of the tenement, with their writings and scribblings, are like “the sealed rooms of pyramids” and “the caves of human dawn.” When Grebe enters one of the apartments, he finds ten or a dozen people “sitting on benches like a parliament.” Field is described “like one of the underground kings of mythology, old judge Minos himself.” The ghetto and its inhabitants become metaphors for man and the dark, incomprehensible world in which he moves.

Writing Technique

The most interesting technique that Bellow utilizes, however, is the absence of the title character, Mr. Green. Because Grebe never actually meets Mr. Green, there have been diverse assertions concerning Grebe's “success” in delivering Mr. Green's check. Some critics thinks that Grebe has put himself in the position of deliberate self-deception, although others think that Grebe's giving the check to “Mr. Green” should not be interpreted as an act of failure or defeat but as a symbolic gesture connected with all he has experienced and learned that day. In this reading, the story does not end with self-deception but rather with hope, with Grebe's awareness of his own identity and function in society.