Allie Has/As A Center?

Allie Fox: No lie, this came up when I searched "Temple of the Self" - what a coincidence that it happened to be Harrison Ford!Right off the bat, let it be said that one cannot push Allie into one of Cohen’s categories. The man, the character, is too multifaceted to shoehorn into one of five groups. Allie’s relationship to a center both within America and abroad is complex. While in America he mouths off about the country and distrusts its educational system. But in the same breath he might complain about outsourced goods and services and refuse to buy anything not made in the good old US of A. Some say that dissent is the highest form of patriotism, and Allie has dissent boiled into his blood. Does this make the man a patriot to America because he has such lofty goals for American values? Or does this make him a sort of hypocritical critic because he expresses his values but leaves rather than fighting to implement them on a grander scale than his own domain? As far as a spiritual center, Allie can quote verse as well as a preacher and turn right around and dismiss God’s ability to intervene or even to exist.

If anything, Allie is just a patriot to his own patriarchal nation. At each stage of the novel he imposes his rule in an almost passive-aggressive way. He keeps his children out of school so that no one can undermine what he teaches them. He nearly creates a mutiny on the ship so that his son doesn’t look at the captain as a higher figure than Allie. He shows up Rev. Spellgood to make sure that Charlie, Jerry, the twins, and mother know that he can lead a family better and then denounces God to make sure that it doesn’t look like he’s bowing down to anyone’s authority. Allie’s center is really at the Temple of the Self, and we only see him falter when this “temple” starts to crumble and erode, and when it finally falls it frees all of his followers to find their own centers instead of being sucked into his.