Our author takes his title from a poem of Whitman’s, a dream vision in which the democratic bard appraises his sleeping comrades (i.e., us) and enters their lives and their dreams. The title, then, does not simply condemn the characters for wasting their lives in moral slumber,12 but serves also as the author’s ars poetica, his moral mission to include himself, for all his social criticism,13 in the same infernal city to which his characters remain, even in the end, somewhat condemned, albeit perhaps on their wayward way to purgatory, or paradise. The novel’s hero is the novel itself: an act of generous self-abnegation before every last inch of the characters’ otherness, art the act of grace the characters can’t allow each other and that we struggle to allow ourselves.