The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Content Warning: This guide and the source text contain references to police violence, rape, anti-gay prejudice and violence, antisemitism, and the persecution of Jewish people by the Nazi regime.

“He didn’t tell them what he now privately believed: that Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons. Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains—walled in, sewn up in layers of batting. For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable.”

Kornblum speaks prophetically and foreshadows Joe’s future, illustrating Joe’s deeper nature and his need for Escape and Freedom, which will take many forms. This quote shows there is much more to Joe than meets the eye, and it invites readers to wonder what Joe Kavalier’s final act of autoliberation will be.

“‘People notice only what you tell them to notice,’ he said. ‘And then only if you remind them.’”

Bernard Kornblum is offering a piece of advice to the young Josef Kavalier: The essence of magic is misdirection. The technique of misdirection is used throughout the novel, and Joe keeps this advice in mind as he works in the comic book industry, seeking ways to entertain and convey important moral truths at the same time.

“Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina’s delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat—was, literally, talked into life.”

This quote is an homage from the narrator to the power of the spoken and written word, which has obvious connotations to the novel but also to comic books and the superheroes/golems contained therein. The narrator draws a connection between the ancient Jewish tradition of the Golem and the modern, pop-cultural tradition of the superhero. Both suggest The Healing Power of Art.