Word: murray
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...lives of all three characters, as Murray observes, are “stymied now by the very lack of smallness…by the absence of any limitations against which to rebel...
...Murray is the metaphorical Emperor and the centripetal personality of the novel. The paradigmatic public intellectual, he invests himself—and is invested by those around him—with an aura of wisdom and moral grandeur...
...Moreover, in recent years, even his literary work has fallen off. He begins to plagiarize himself and rehash stale clichés. But what matters most to him, albeit unconsciously, is maintaining his lofty public image. Essentially, he becomes a parody of himself, an actor in the part of Murray Thwaite...
...characters come on the scene with iconoclastic bravado. Seeley, the powerhungry, postmodernist Australian expat, launches a magazine in the hopes of fomenting a nihilistic revolution and toppling Murray, whom he regards as a gross charlatan and a fraud...
Ultimately, he is the only one who comes to grasp the chasm between appearances and reality in the whorling world of New York high society. He begins to see the real Murray behind the sententious veneer, and is the only one with the courage and acumen to cry out: “The Emperor has no clothes...