Why is this Jerry's grand occasion to tell his brother the truth? Why does someone, in the midst of your worst suffering, decide the time has come to drive home, disguised in the form of character analysis, all the contempt they have been harboring for you for all these years? What in your suffering makes their superiority so fulsome, so capacious, makes the expression of it so enjoyable? Why this occasion for launching his protest at living in the shadow of me? Why, if he had to tell me all this, couldn't he have told it to me when I was feeling my oats? Why does he even believe he's in my shadow? Miami's biggest cardiac surgeon! The heart victim's savior, DrLevov!
"Dad? He fucking let you slide through--don't you know that? If Dad had said, 'Look, you'll never get my approval for this, never, I am not having grandchildren half this and half that,' then you would have had to make a choiceBut you never had to make a choiceBecause he let you slide throughEverybody has always let you slide throughAnd that is why, to this day, nobody knows who you areYou are unrevealed--that is the story, Seymour, unrevealedThat
tiffany silver jewelry is why your own daughter decided to blow you awayYou are never straight about anything and she hated you for itYou keep yourself a secretYou don't choose ever
"Why are you saying this? What do you want me to choose? What are we talking about?"
"You think you know what a man is? You have no idea what a man isYou think you know what a daughter is? You have no idea what a daughter isYou think you know what this country is? You have no idea what this country isYou have a false image of everythingAll you know is what a fucking glove isThis country is frighteningOf course she was rapedWhat kind of company do you think she was keeping? Of course out there she was going to get rapedThis isn't Old Rimrock, old buddy--she's out there, old buddy, in the USAShe enters that world, that loopy world out there, with what's going on out there--what do you expect? A kid from Rimrock, New Jersey, of course she doesn't know how to behave out there, of course the shit hits the fanWhat could she know? She's like a wild child out there in the worldShe can't get enough of it--she's still acting upA room off McCarter HighwayAnd why
prada bags cheap not? Who wouldn't? You prepare her for life milking the cows? For what kind of life? Unnatural, all artificial, all of itThose assumptions you live withYou're still in your old man's dreamworld, Seymour, still up there with Lou Levov in glove heavenA household tyrannized by gloves, bludgeoned by gloves, the only thing in life--ladies' gloves! Does he still tell the great one about the woman who sells the gloves washing her hands in a sink between each color? Oh where oh where is that outmoded America, that decorous America where a woman had twenty-five pairs of gloves? Your kid blows your norms to kingdom come, Seymour, and you still think you know what life is!"
Life is just a short period of time in which we are alive "You wanted Miss America? Well, you've got her, with a vengeance--she's your daughter! You wanted to be a real American jock, a real American marine, a real American hotshot with a beautiful Gentile babe on your arm? You longed to belong like everybody else to the United States of America? Well, you do now, big boy, thanks to your daughterThe reality of this place is right up in your kisser
chloe bag nowWith the help of your daughter you're as deep in the shit as a man can get, the real American crazy shitAmerica amok! America amuck! Goddamn it, Seymour, goddamn you, if you were a father who loved his daughter," thunders Jerry into the phone--and the hell with the convalescent patients waiting in the corridor for him to check out their new valves and new arteries, to tell how grateful they are to him for their new lease on life, Jerry shouts away, shouts all he wants if it's shouting he wants to do, and the hell with the rules of the hospitalHe is one of the surgeons who shouts: if you disagree with him he shouts, if you cross him he shouts, if you just stand there and do nothing he shoutsHe does not do what hospitals tell him to do or fathers expect him to do or wives want him to do, he does what he wants to do, does as he pleases, tells people just who and what he is every minute of the day so that nothing about him is a secret, not his opinions, his frustrations, his urges, neither his appetite nor his hatredIn the sphere of the will, he is unequivocating, uncompromising