Yet in his dream, Frederick is trapped in time suspended. In this nether world of his mind’s creation he has neither power nor control, as past and present surrealistically form their own strange reality. The classmates who taunt him about his Jewishness and who pursue him with a violent anti-Semitism are prophetic of Germany’s hate-filled future, a future that George Webber encounters in the latter portion of You Cant Go Home Again.

In his dream, Frederick finds that his family treats him as if he were a child, not the adult he has become, and their smothering attention suffocates him, much like the adult Wolfe found himself to be when he returned to Asheville. To assert his power and “manliness,” Frederick recounts his wealth and ownership, much like King Midas counting his gold. Yet the ancient cobbled streets and his connection with the past fill him with exquisite happiness. When he encounters his old schoolmates, whom he feels somehow destined to meet, they are old and battered, and he knows that they have all suffered blows from life. He feels a sense of unity with his enemies and, indeed, with all mankind. He longs to tell them of his life in America after he left Germany, of his loneliness and poverty in his early years, and of his empty success. He yearns to tell them how he gained power yet somehow lost the dream, how like smoke and sand the boy’s dream has vanished.

Like the characters who come and go at the Jacks’ party that very evening, Frederick has become one of the hollow men, possessing a “suave and kindly cynicism” and “the varnish of complaisance.” Like J. Alfred Prufrock, who lived in the world between the real and the unreal, between imagination and reality—who lived a life stunted and dulled and full of emptiness in that great city London—Frederick Jack stood, in the final moments of his dream, looking toward the water, rocking in time’s harbor and listening to the mermaids sing.

In the next four chapters, Wolfe sets about establishing his themes and further developing his characterization of Frederick and Esther Jack. Frederick (Fritz) believes that he is in total control of his world. Like a Roman emperor, he sensuously luxuriates in his sumptuous surroundings, narcissistically adoring his own health and vigor. He possesses not only the luxury of wealth but that of time as well, time enough to reflect from his height and distance upon the antlike populace who “swarm” to and fro, both literally and figuratively beneath him. Yet, from the beginning, the almost imperceptible tremor coming from deep within the rock below causes him a vague sense of foreboding and apprehension. The natural world seems overshadowed by the cruel, piercing dominance of these lifeless, monstrous buildings. Indeed, his connection with nature is an artificial one, experienced through the “expensive” sport of golf. He walks upon the “rich velvet of the greens” and “luxuriates” upon the “cool veranda of the club.” Even nature has been tamed for his rich men’s pursuits. The artificiality of the buildings mock the golden light of the day, an imitation of gold and silver: “silver-burnished steel and cliffs of harsh white-yellow brick, haggard in young light,” imagery of false idols, craven images. Indeed, “the immense and vertical shapes of the great buildings … dwindled to glittering needles of cold silver [as] light cut sharply the crystal weather of a blue shell-fragile sky.” Nature seems to bleed, indeed, to face destruction from these needlelike buildings. The creatures of the city seem to be miniature representations of this lifeless creation. Their cabs are like “hard-shelled prehistoric beasts emerging from Grand Central projectile-like in solid beetle-bullet flight.” Mr. Jack has paid for this sense of order and power out of chaos “with the ransom of an emperor.” He has indeed paid dearly, with his very soul. The window of his apartment building is paralleled by the window of his eye from which the narrowness of his vision is reflected. He worships illusion—the illusion of power, the illusion of youth, the illusion of eternal potency—and “in that insolent boast of steel and stone [he sees] … a permanence surviving every danger, an answer, crushing and convulsive in its silence, to every doubt.”

Frederick is characterized as a hollow man, fragmented and full of self-delusion. In contrast, Esther is characterized as a woman possessing a sense of oneness, a connectedness with life, past and present, rich and poor, old and young. Through Esther is “always the clear design, the line of life, running like a thread of gold” from childhood to the present. Her beauty is real, not artificial. Her face reveals complex emotions; it is not smooth and controlled as is Frederick’s. Esther is capable of genuine sorrow and depth of feeling. She does not merely take from others, as does Fritz and others like him, for her own gain.