The Quitter Section 5: Fate vs. Free Will

Written Parallel

Harvey says:  "But [writing for the Jazz Review] had such a good reputation" (91).
Harvey says:  "I had the respect I wanted for being a fighter" (35).


Throughout his life, Harvey has always cared so much about his reputation and what people think about him.  When he was younger, he needed to be respected for being a fighter, but as he matures, he turns into an intellectual, where he still strives to have a good reputation.

Visual Parallel

Shown above are two images (both long shots with two people) where Harvey meets a very successful and famous intellectual in a field that he loves.  The first picture shows Harvey meeting Ira Gitler, a famous Jazz reviewer, while the second one shoes him with Robert Crumb, a comic book illustrator who goes on to do big things.  One interesting observation I made is that these are really the only two characters (by that I mean people who appear in more than one frame) who wear glasses.  The glasses seem to represent knowledge, as only the most intellectual people wear them, and nobody in the sports world or in the Navy were ever shown wearing glasses.

Fate vs. Free Will

Each time Harvey quits, he writes about it as if it were his inevitable fate to do so, and I strongly disagree.  When he first quit football, he did so because he wasn't the star anymore and the coach didn't play him as much as he would've liked.  He acted as if some force (fate) was against him and that he had to quit.  Later, when quit the Navy, it wasn't because he was physically unable to do any of the tasks, it was because he didn't know how to do laundry and broke down mentally.  This happened once again when he was in college.  He overreacted to getting a C+ on one test and dropped out.  His attitude was that he couldn't learn anything and was destined to fail, and because of this, he did fail.

Being a second generation Jewish immigrant in a poor neighborhood of Cleveland, Harvey was not destined to succeed, and he knew that.  He took this the wrong way by thinking this meant he was destined to fail, which is not true.  Therefore, when times got hard, he decided to quit before even trying to fight through it because he believed he wasn't supposed to make it through.

However, he only failed because he chose to, not because this was his fate, and this becomes increasingly obvious as the novel goes on.  When he finally gets the courage to try to write for a big time magazine (after being pressured by Ira Gitler), he succeeds and becomes an admired writer almost immediately.  Also, his first comics were a huge hit.  These two facts show us that Harvey is actually really talented and could've succeeded much earlier.  However, he chose to shy away from all of his challenges earlier in life by quitting everything right when they got tough for him, although his future success tells us that he could've made it through those challenges if he had just tried.