The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000

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Themes

Escape and Freedom

Content Warning: This guide and the source text contain references to police violence, rape, anti-gay prejudice and violence, antisemitism, and the persecution of Jewish people by the Nazi regime.

The idea of escape is the novel’s most central theme. Growing up in Prague, Joe longs to become an escape artist, and, under the tutelage of Bernard Kornblum, he repeatedly risks his life in pursuit of this goal. Dismayed by Joe’s near-drowning, Kornblum makes the thematic subtext of this work explicit:

He didn’t tell them what he now privately believed: that Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons. Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains—walled in, sewn up in layers of batting (37).

Kornblum practices escape for its own sake. For him, the challenge itself is the point. For Joe, on the other hand, any trap he can devise is only a metaphor for the “invisible chains” that are far harder to escape. Joe’s escape from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938 is perhaps his greatest feat, but he cannot escape the burden of his responsibility to free his family, nor can he escape the guilt he feels at having survived the Holocaust when so many others did not. Ultimately, he wants to escape from himself, an impossible and self-destructive wish that leads Kornblum to fear for his future.

Sam, too, desires escape and attempts to flee in several forms. Like Joe, Sam’s first escape is a literal one: Sam escapes the poverty of his Brooklyn home by becoming successful in comic books. However, the greatest thing Sam attempts to escape from is his orientation and the prejudice and discrimination that come with it. This is a life-long struggle for him: Like Joe, Sam wishes to escape himself, and it takes him most of his life to learn that this is neither possible nor desirable. George Desey, the entrepreneur who publishes Joe and Sam’s comics, uses the language of escape to explain Sam’s predicament: “I have been in the secrets business a long time now, Clay, […] Take it from me, a secret is a heavy kind of chain” (625). Everything Sam has done to escape his true self has only left him burdened by secrets and thus more trapped than ever.

The desire for escape extends to the work’s secondary characters. At first, Rosa is a young girl who doesn’t want to get married and live the circumscribed life of a 1940s American housewife. When that fate does indeed become her own, she tries to escape from it in several ways, mostly through work. Tommy is a lonesome boy, and like many “outsiders,” Tommy flees into the confines of his imagination, taking on the persona of the Bug. The longing for escape is ubiquitous in the world of Kavalier and Clay, though everyone’s traps are different. Joe initially falls in love with comic books because they provide him with a sense of possibility and freedom, and the popularity of the form suggests that this longing for freedom is universal.

The Healing Power of Art

Art is at the center of Sam’s, Joe’s, and Rosa’s lives. Each earns money by creating art for the comics, and each struggles with the tension between art as creative expression and art as commercial product. Rosa and Sam both view their work in the comics as a means of paying the bills while they strive toward success in more respected art forms. Only Joe recognizes what almost no one in America recognizes at the time—that comics can be an art form as expressive as any other. As Joe works on his masterwork, The Golem, he is aware that the difficult, unconventional comic may struggle to find an audience. When Sam asks to read it, he says, “I don’t think you will like that. Probably nobody will like that. Too dark” (576). Beyond being too dark, the work may be too idiosyncratic and too thematically challenging for what has always been seen as a commercial art form. Even so, it has enormous healing power for its creator:

Joe came to feel that the work—telling this story—was helping to heal him. All of the grief and black wonder that he was never able to express, before or afterward […] all of it went into the queasy angles and stark compositions, the cross-hatchings and vast swaths of shadow, the distended and fractured and finely-minced panels of his monstrous comic book. (577-78)

Joe begins this work imagining that it will demonstrate to everyone that comics can be as expressive and true as any art form, but as time goes on it becomes ever more insular, until he believes that no one will understand it. Even so, it has given him a means to express what he could not express in any other way, and in doing so it has healed him.

The power of art comes to play a saving role in every one of the characters’ lives. Rosa uses art to make sense of her dreams and later to deal with her unhappiness as a suburbanite. Sam clings to art, and the novel that he works on through much of the book, though it is rarely mentioned in detail, possesses a saving quality for him as well: He works on American Disillusionment as an outlet for his own frustrations. The novel suggests that art provides humans the opportunity to escape from or deal with their difficult surroundings and difficult times.

Society and the Individual Conscience

Throughout The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay struggle to reconcile their individual consciences with large-scale social prejudices and acts of societal violence. As they reckon with the moral weight of their decisions, they also recognize that these decisions are shaped and limited by social forces beyond their control.

Joe struggles with survivor’s guilt as the one chosen by his family to escape the Nazis. Because he alone maintained his freedom, he feels intensely guilty that he was unable to free his family as well, though he did just about everything possible. Caught up in a system of racist violence far larger than himself, Joe’s life takes on outsized moral weight: He believes he must redeem the lives of all those who weren’t as lucky as he was, an impossible task that plunges him into inescapable guilt. Guilt is an emotion that plagues Joe throughout the novel, and it affects nearly every aspect of his life: It causes him to pick fights with random Germans, to feel undeserving of success and happiness, to leave his pregnant girlfriend behind (though he is unaware of the pregnancy), and to join the navy. It causes him to kill an innocent man, and it keeps him from being able to return to the only family he has left after the war’s end—Rosa and Sam. This struggle illustrates the contradictory and destructive nature that an overbearing sense of guilt can cause a person. For Joe, art is the only effective means of dealing with this debilitating guilt. In his comics, and especially in the highly personal, long-form work The Golem, he finds a way to work through the irresolvable moral problems that torment him in his life.

Sam, too, struggles with a strong sense of guilt. For Sam, the cause of the turmoil is his orientation and the pervasive anti-gay prejudice that surrounds him in post-war America. Sam struggles to accept that he prefers men over women, and his fear of social condemnation leads him to break off a relationship with a man he loves. Sam’s guilt arises not from his orientation itself but from the social prejudices that attach to it—prejudices that force him into a life of secrecy. Even though his marriage to Rosa is rooted in mutual care, Sam remains unhappy, and throughout his marriage to Rosa, he struggles to repress his desires. By leaving this marriage at the end of the novel, Sam frees both Rosa and himself.