Lost In Their Paradise: A Study Of The Father-son Relationship In E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate And Loon Lake

Family is an important element in all of Doctorow's fiction. In Billy Bathgate and Loon Lake, there is an intense concern to create a family as a locus of identity and stability in a troubling world. The family serves also as a kind of metaphor for Doctorow's vision of American culture. It is an image that can bring together disparate cultural elements into an inclusive whole while not destroying American multiplicity. Thus, if his compositions are sometimes dark in the assessments of American values, Doctorow's vision is ultimately positive, for, as he affirms that fiction matters, and it makes a difference in this world.At the heart of the family saga of Doctorow's fiction is the relationship between fathers and sons. Fathers and sons are in quest of one another. And which father a son chooses determines his future. The relationship of father and son in Doctorow's fiction is a metaphor for his view of American myth and history. Doctorow distinguished his Billy Bathgate and Loon Lake by juxtaposing the misfortune of low class people, family structure and gangster to depict the ideological ethos of contemporary America, and through the permanent motifs in Jewish American literature: the Father-son motif.Living by their not inconsiderable wits, the heroes manage, despite the often painful isolation characteristic of the American hero, to forge an identity and grasp remarkable material success, and extraordinary power. The heroes advance not through hard work, good deeds, and luck, but by seizing power and instilling fear. Billy Bathgate, in its depiction of cement bucket executions and gangland shootings, graphically represents the brutality of the organized crime. Thus, the American Dream has ultimately become corrupt with the gradual overemphasis laid on its material aspect. Doctorow keenly detects the tendency of the corruption in the 1930s and gives his somber reflection on it in his novels Billy Bathgate and Loon Lake. The main causes of Billy and Joe's tragedies and corruption of American Dream are not their own character defects, but the joined effect of American historical events, trends of thoughts, social problems, and cultural conflicts.