Tropic of Cancer

The narrator and protagonist of the novel, this fictionalized version of Miller is a near-precise analogue of the author. An aspiring American writer who grew up in New York City and only recently arrived in Paris, Henry is in a turbulent marriage with his beloved but estranged wife and feels frustrated with the limitations that bourgeois society has placed on his ability to express himself authentically. While he can be kind and loyal to his friends, he also frequently mocks them, both behind their backs and to their faces. He has deeply mixed feelings about America, sometimes recalling it with great fondness but more often lambasting its cultural emptiness and slavish devotion to capitalism. Throughout the text, he goes into great detail about his desire to live fully in the sensory world and to immerse himself in both joy and pain. This philosophical approach involves eating and drinking to excess as well as embracing the feeling of starvation when he has no food. Henry asserts in Chapter 7: “I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer” (98).