"While the reeds bound the oars"- Chicago always threatens to entangle the Bellovian character, as also does his family, to stifle him. In these stories, Bellow's characters are repeatedly tempted by visions of escape - sometimes mystical, sometimes religious, and often Platonic (Platonic in the sense that the real world, the Chicago world, is felt to be not the real world but only a place where the soul is in exile, a place of mere appearances). [...]