At times it almost feels like Duddy cares about nobody other than himself-this is untrue, manifestly, because he cares about his family … but he is not someone who gets close to others. When desperate-and oh, how often he gets desperate-he will lash out and make deals no matter what the cost, breaking them later if he comes to regret or feel chained by them. It’s easy to hate him: he is relentless to the point of self-destruction.
For all his father’s tall tales about friendship with the enigmatic Boy Wonder, it’s Duddy who gets things done. Unlike the other Kravitz men, Duddy is an operator. Uncle Benjy recognizes this when he later confers upon Duddy the title of “head of the family”. He is clever to the point of cunning, and when he’s with his father or even his grandfather, there is a tenderness to him-a fierce desire to make his family proud. When he is good, when he is helpful and kind to those around him, he is like nothing else. It’s easy to love him: he is relentless, almost a force of nature. The novel succeeds or fails based on one’s feelings about Duddy. Always, his grandfather’s assertion that “a man without land is nothing” nips at him, spurring Duddy onwards in the pursuit of picturesque farmland around Lac Saint-Pierre. The moment Duddy graduates from school and is unleashed upon the unsuspecting Montreal landscape he never rests.
Owing to the speed with which Duddy wheels and deals, however, it feels like more years pass. The story takes place before Duddy reaches twenty-one (then the age of majority in Quebec), with the bulk of it happening when he is around eighteen or nineteen years old. One of the best tricks that Richler pulls off is managing to make a short span of time feel like over a decade has passed. Indeed, Duddy’s long memory figures prominently in a novel that is, as its title implies, his personal journey into adulthood. From the first, Mordecai Richler establishes that Duddy is a bully and prone to holding a grudge. MacPherson, who earns Duddy’s enmity when he insults Duddy’s father and quickly finds out that he has crossed the wrong boy. We first meet Duddy through his Scottish history teacher, the tired and broken Mr. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a kind of bildungsroman for an anti-hero.
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