Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Lots of critics have noted how important it is that Seize the Day starts out with its protagonist heading down.
Literally. And figuratively too.
As Tommy Wilhelm takes the elevator from his floor down to the lobby of the Hotel Gloriana, he begins a descent that's echoed—symbolically—throughout the rest of the novel.
This descent is tied to the novel's recurring water imagery and symbolism. More than once throughout Seize the Day, Wilhelm finds himself quoting lines from John Milton's Lycidas—a seventeenth-century elegy for a drowned friend. Just as Milton's Lycidas is sunk "beneath the wat'ry floor," so too does Wilhelm feel like his troubles and woes are drowning him. As the novel's fourth chapter draws to a close, he thinks:
But what have I let myself in for? The waters of the earth are going to roll over me. (4.129)
Wilhelm may feel like he's drowning in a sea of cares, but as more than one critic has realized, the water imagery and symbolism in Seize the Day isn't all bad. As Janice P. Stout has argued, the novel's allusions to Lycidas promise "not just death, but death and rebirth." (Stout, Janice P., "Suffering as Meaning in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day," Renascence 39.2 (1987): 369.)
If we follow that line of thinking, we can see that when Wilhelm finally sinks into his sorrow and tears in the novel's final paragraphs, he isn't actually drowning—instead, the symbolism suggests that a profound transformation is on its way:
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)
Let's hope these tearful showers will lead to flowers for poor old Wilhelm.