Neighbors (novel) - Analysis

Analysis

Berger's off-kilter tone blurs the line between paranoia and reality, defense and offense, action and intention, ally and adversary. Harry and Ramona seem to constantly undergo changes in their respective personalities and Enid and Elaine appear to choose sides against Earl at random, but Berger also implies that it is Earl’s sense of reality that is skewed and deluded.

Earl is frustrated because he can never prove that Harry and Ramona are doing anything wrong on purpose, and the more he attempts to expose them, the more ridiculous he makes himself. Yet Earl comes to realize that Harry and Ramona have served as the crucible of his redemption: being forced out of his comfort zone of complacency and habit has provided him with an excitement he has never known before. As Earl comes to recognize value in his neighbors, he realizes that his wife is a distrustful alcoholic, his daughter is an underachiever and petty thief, and that his new neighbours can provide him with an escape from his existence of insignificance and emotional impotence. From a nightmare comes hope and a strengthened resolve to survive. In his study of Berger, writer Stanley Trachtenberg describes Neighbors as an existentialist parable in which "the loss of coherence between various aspects of self comically fragments the notion of identity and thus fictionalizes the existential concept of authenticity as a shaping condition of it."

In a 1980 newspaper interview, Berger said of Neighbors, "As my 10th novel, begun at the close of my 20th year as a published novelist, it is appropriately a bizarre celebration of whatever gift I have, the strangest of all my narratives . . . the morality of this work, like that of all my other volumes, will be in doubt until the end of the narrative – and perhaps to the end of eternity, now that I think about it."