Karl Glogauer

Karl Glogauer is the protagonist of two novels by Michael Moorcock, and a secondary character in additional novels and short stories.

Fictional biography

In Behold the Man, he acts as a surrogate Christ after travelling to 28 AD in a time machine. The novel Breakfast in the Ruins contains a somewhat different Glogauer, centering on a homosexual love affair between him and an unnamed man from Nigeria. The chapters of the novel are interspersed with detailed, though fiction, fantasies about Glogauer's past lives.

In Behold the Man, and at the start of Breakfast in the Ruins, Glogauer is white but by the end of Breakfast he has become black. (Similarly, Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius is white in The Final Programme but black in A Cure For Cancer.)

Development

Some of the aspects of Glogauer's childhood as described in Behold the Man are based on Moorcock's own childhood, though he says "I had such a happy childhood I had a hard time finding material, especially for the novel version".^[1] Likewise, Glogauer's frequent headaches were also inspired by migraines that Moorcock suffered from, although these were later discovered to be caused by an adverse reaction to nicotine rather than any psychological causes as in Glogauer's case.

Bibliography

• Behold the Man
• Breakfast in the Ruins

He also makes appearances - or is mentioned - in the following books/short stories:

• The English Assassin (appears)
• The End of All Songs (appears)
• The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century (mentioned)
• The Peking Junction (mentioned)
• The Eternal Champion (mentioned)
• The Condition of Muzak (reported that he was at the party with just about everyone else)

In other media

References