Why Can’t Duddy Go Home Again?

Abstract

In the continuum of Canadian comic fictions reaching back to the early nineteenth century, in the academic context of its study, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is Mordecai Richler’s most important novel. That tradition contains three towering figures, their authors’ signature characters: Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s Sam Slick in The Clockmaker of 1836, Stephen Leacock’s Josh Smith in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town of 1912, and Richler’s Duddy Kravitz of 1959. All three come to troublesome and troubling ends. In the final pages of Duddy Kravitz, things fall apart badly for Duddy. He has betrayed his surrogate family, comprising Yvette and Virgil, and refuses to go home in the family car. Regarding the refusal, neither Duddy nor the narrator answers father Max’s pointed “Why?” “Never mind why,” says Duddy. This essay minds why. It answers that Duddy may well have been planning to go back to Yvette for one more try at reconciliation, which would have been a momentous event. But he is distracted by a waiter’s offering to run a tab for him, thereby recognizing Duddy’s material success. Had Duddy gone home to Yvette and his only hope of return to true family, the novel would have ended comically rather than tragically. As it is, Duddy Kravitz is left slouching towards his useless old home with his hopeless family, homeless.