once the other mourners leave. Towards the novel's end, Suttree falls ill with typhoid fever and suffers a lengthy hallucination. This occurs after a black friend of Suttree is killed in a fight with the police and Harrogate is arrested in a failed robbery attempt. In the end, he feels his identity as an individual is affirmed by his time living in destitution, and he leaves Knoxville, seeking a new life. Reception Novelist Nelson Algren argued that the novel was "a memorable American comedy by an original storyteller." Estimable reviews by such noted writers and literary critics as Anatole Broyard, Jerome Charyn, Guy Davenport, and Shelby Foote were followed by the Times Literary Supplement review which saw the novel as "Faulknerian in its gentle wryness, and a freakish imaginative flair reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor." The influential profile writer and music journalist Stanley Booth observed that Suttree was "probably the funniest and most unbearably sad of McCarthy's books...which seem to me unsurpassed in American literature." Late in life, after losing much of his physical sensing, film critic Roger Ebert wrote, "I began to live through this desperate man's sad life." References External links Charyn, J., Suttree, New York Times Book Review, Feb 1979 "Searching for Suttree", by Wes Morgan (2004); photographs of some of the Knoxville locations featured in Suttree 1979 American novels American autobiographical novels Novels by Cormac McCarthy Culture of Knoxville, Tennessee Southern United States in fiction Tennessee River Novels set in East Tennessee Fiction set in 1951 Novels set in Appalachia