In the despairing, wheedling form of Tommy Wilhelm, Bellow creates an icon for a modern America in spiritual crisis, consumed by illusory dreams of success and staggering towards horrified self-awareness.
Western education and the film/media business condition us to believe in an illusory mirage of success based on desire and achievement.
The early success was illusory.
Montfort's success was illusory, however.
"Why stop at the icing," operators say, "when we can have the whole cake?" And chartercrats like Arne Duncan, with dreams of scaleability dancing in their sugarplum heads, may really think that full-scale charter systems can work because A) they don't understand that most charter "success" is illusory and B) they don't know why.
Yet perceptions of success are as illusory as fame itself.
It is no small irony that individuals whose financial success has fostered an illusory belief in their own autonomy are, in their day-to-day lives, highly dependent on the contributions of many others.
On technical grounds, it must be counted a success: every experience be it illusory, hallucinatory, a dream, or whatnot is guaranteed to have an object, viz. the neutral element that is the experience.
But the success appears to have been largely illusory.
Rather than pursuing illusory hopes, we should do what is necessary for real success.
