Franzen's Freedom (again)

In my previous comments about Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, I did not discuss the title. In his much-ballyhooed 2010 Time Magazine article about Franzen, Lev Grossman wrote:

There is something beyond freedom that people need: work, love, belief in something, commitment to something. Freedom is not enough. It’s necessary but not sufficient. It’s what you do with Freedom — what you give it up for — that matters.

Freedom begins with agency. Freedom involves a lack of restraint and an ability to act. In Freedom, once characters throw off the strings of the family who raised them and begin making their own decisions, they have an agency that can be called Freedom. But that is also the point at which the Freedom ends, as each choice has consequences, eliminates other options, and piles up casualties.

No one in these stories is free. Those advantages they enjoy are bought by someone. Walter and Patty’s upper-middle-class gentrification and their bright children? Paid for by Patty’s decision not to have a career and to give up an independent identity. Some opportunities are bought with money inherited by earlier generations. Patty and Walter’s marriage? Bought at first by Richard’s superhuman (for him) self-denial of temptation. Wildlife could be preserved, but only after mountaintop removal mining or the death of a loved one. All those transactions restrict subsequent choices and limit freedom. The birds that seem so free, must adapt to an existence that is increasingly circumscribed and exponentially depleted. Further, the resentment felt by Walter and his forebears is located in the belief that they have paid but someone else has enjoyed the spoils. 

Perhaps Franzen wants us to see the characters’ (and our) short-sighted entitlement, that there is Freedom even if we do not feel free. Perhaps, writing from his spartan, cell-like space, with his (now habitual) wad of tobacco, Franzen’s Freedom is an ironic title for a story about entanglement. I’ll spare you the Bobby McGee quote.