182
PARTISAN REVIEW
excommunicated. He does not simply hold a grudge or find life
hard to manage; he is totally alienated by his nature. It
is
from that
kind of total alienation that the greatest comedy comes.
The lean crazy knight, the fat tavern knight, the pathetic wad–
dling little tramp, the dreamer on Gorohovy Street. These are the
supreme Unemployables. The comedy they create
is
immensely com–
plicated and ambiguous and it contains the sympathy and self–
identification Pritchett speaks of, the harsh social satire Kropotkin
describes; in it
in
addition are motives of the cruelest personal ridicule,
the most abject pathos, revenge, pity. In the reader or onlooker there
is
both a profound identification and a profound dissociation. The
Superfluous Man
is
both the butt and the prey of the man-made
world. In himself the reader
is
both the fat brutal cop and the
poor dodging tramp. This
is
the split that produces the mystery of
the greatest comedy and it is to this mystery that the figure of
Oblomov most surely belongs.
