Although Wilhelm's attempts to "seize the day" end in disaster, the novel's final scene suggests that he may have learned an important lesson after all. As Wilhelm gets swept into the funeral parlor and over to the casket, this confrontation with another man's death brings his own life into focus:
Standing a little apart, Wilhelm began to cry. He cried at first softly and from sentiment, but soon from deeper feeling. He sobbed loudly and his face grew distorted and hot, and the tears stung his skin. A man—another human creature, was what first went through his thoughts, but other and different things were torn from him. What'll I do? I'm stripped and kicked out . . . Oh, Father? What do I ask of you? What'll I do about the kids—Tommy, Paul? My children. And Olive? My dear. Why, why, why—you must protect me against that devil who wants my life. (7.99)
As Wilhelm stands to the side of the coffin and cries, the other mourners in the funeral parlor look on with sympathy, and wonder who the heck he is. In this moment, Wilhelm may be an anonymous face in the crowd, but he's not invisible. Most importantly, the water imagery and symbolism of the novel's final paragraph suggest that our protagonist is about to undergo genuine change:
The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in Wilhelm's blind, wet eyes; the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great and happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart's ultimate need. (7.107)
In his 1973 article, 'The Maladroit, the Medico, and the Magician: Saul Bellow's Seize the Day,' literary scholar Lee J. Richmond pointed out that the language of this closing passage echoes the language of the poem that Tamkin presses into Wilhelm's hands earlier in the novel. If we follow Richmond's reading, then it's possible to understand the ending of Seize the Day as a transformation of the nonsense that Tamkin has been spouting all along. Although Tamkin's advice to Wilhelm has obviously been self-serving and manipulative, in the end, Wilhelm's tearful encounter with another man's death gives him a symbolic rebirth. In other words: We're looking right down the barrel at Wilhelm's mid-life crisis.