The novel, as a literary form, has experienced a precipitous decline since the 1950s. Younger generations of novelists often lack ideas and have nothing to say. Bellow believes that modern society was long supported by an unheard music which buoyed it, gave it flow, continuity, coherence. But this humanistic music has ceased, and now there is a different barbarous music welling up, and a different elemental force has begun to manifest itself, without form as yet. It would appear that most modern individuals have chosen to go under, with the result that our souls have been contaminated by their link to the body rather than strengthened by their bond to the cosmos, to God.
Pure love is overcome by perversity.
We become fixated on the sexual members. The title of the book comes from a remark Crader makes to a journalist. The Red Wheel , a multi-volume novel depicting the history of the Russian Revolution. The Russian army s humiliating defeat is depicted against the backdrop of the moral and spiritual decay in Russian society at large. Solzhenitsyn shows how the increasing secularization of society hastened the Bolshevik revolution and the horrors of communism.