[2] Mr. Artur Sammler, a Holocaust survivor, intellectual and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a "registrar of madness", a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (Moon landings, endless possibilities).

"Sorry for all and sore at heart", he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering.

To Mr. Sammler—who by the end of the novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beings—a good life is one in which a person does what is "required of him".

Some critics have pigeonholed the novel as a response to the Holocaust or as a Jeremiad against 1960s social mores — and it is true that Sammler is horrified by those mores because, as Philip Roth pointed out, he views them as "the betrayal by the crazy species of the civilized ideal" — others have noted that the novel revolves, as does Herzog, around Sammler's conflicts between intellect and intuition, between acting in the world and standing aside to observe it.

[8] In a lecture a few years later, asked to explain those lines, Bellow said "You read the New Testament and the assumption Jesus makes continually is that people know the difference immediately between good and evil... And that is in part what faith means.