Though Bloom does not detail a link between Dante and Kafka, he implies that Kafka is the Dante of Modernism, noting how Kafka, like Dante, was a “mythmaker,” elevating his writing to the point of “transmut[ing] writing into a religion” (428). This “religion” is aesthetic, as Bloom elaborates: “But the fragmentary best of Kafka—stories, parables, aphorisms—goes beyond Proust and Joyce in arming us with a spirituality […] now dependent on belief or ideology” (427). Though Bloom acknowledges the role of Kafka’s Jewish heritage in his writing, he continues to argue for The Canon as a Representation of Artistic Merit, locating Kafka alongside two other Chaotic Age writers, Proust and Joyce. Bloom emphasizes Kafka’s “universalism in and for our century,” which reaffirms the criterion of “strangeness” in Bloom’s conception of the canon.

While Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa are praised for their reinterpretation of Whitman, Beckett is praised for his integration of Shakespeare. Regarding The Value of Reading and the Durability of Art, these comparisons complete Bloom’s vision of literature as an interconnected field of competing authors. Bloom notes Borges’s “labyrinthine vision of literature as a blurring of authorial identities” (443), which connects to Bloom’s own view; however, Bloom asserts that, rather than “blurring” identities, the various connections between works and writers can be located and analyzed through his theory of influence. Beckett, then, is a culmination of all the authors who came before him, as the last entry in Bloom’s canon. Bloom notes ties to Proust, Joyce, Shakespeare, Dante, Ibsen, and more in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame. These connections form the basis of Bloom’s argument that reading is valuable because it expands the mind of the reader and has the potential to inspire the “strangeness” that creates new and lasting pieces of art.

The final essays of The Western Canon call Bloom’s assertions of The Contrast Between Aesthetic and Political Value in Literature into further question, as he asserts the importance of Kafka’s Jewish heritage and appears to devalue South American writers based on the influence of Whitman. Of Kafka’s place in the canon, Bloom notes how Kafka “epitomize[s] the split between being and consciousness […] a subject he identified with being Jewish, or at least as being particularly exilic Jewish” (424). Kafka’s Jewish heritage plays a significant role in Bloom’s reading of his works and letters, even insisting that Kafka’s writing “simply is Jewish writing” (422).

This insistence contradicts Bloom’s assertions elsewhere in the text that the femininity of women writers is insignificant to their writing’s aesthetic value and that many of the white, male authors supposedly “transcend” gender. A critical element of Bloom’s argument, that “the dogma of the School of Resentment […] admits that aesthetic choices are masks for social and political overdeterminations” (491), only applies when the “resenters” want to bring women, writers of color, and queer authors into the canon, which Bloom argues is “political.” However, Bloom appears to accept that, for Kafka and Proust, heritage and identity are relevant in analyzing aesthetic value.

In discussing Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa, specifically in their relation to Walt Whitman, another contradiction appears in Bloom’s writing. In discussing Whitman, Bloom earlier asserted: “We have had remarkable women poets […] Even if a dozen of that eminence yet spring up among us, they will not decenter Walt” (260), claiming that Whitman “was no more a male phenomenon than was Shakespeare, or Henry James” (260). Despite Bloom’s claim of certain male authors transcending gender, his argument implies that women cannot write poetry of the caliber that men have written, which reveals an inherently sexist bias in his aesthetic assumptions.

Similarly, in discussing the Latin American and Portuguese authors’ poetry, Bloom suspects that “Hispanic Whitman is so bewildering a problem” because Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa “all failed to read Song of Myself and the Sea-Drift elegies closely enough” (451). Again, though Bloom is focused on the anxiety of influence in this passage, as with the prior quote regarding women the implication is that there cannot be a “Hispanic” or a woman poet to rival Whitman’s aesthetic quality. What is more, he reveals a strongly American-centric stance in assuming that writers from other literary traditions and cultures should center an American poet’s work in their writing, instead of considering the Hispanic and Portuguese influences they may favor in their work. Thus, what Bloom regards as a “fail[ure] to read” Whitman’s works “closely enough” is more likely a preference on the part of such authors for elevating other influences.

Bloom’s “Elegiac Conclusion,” as its name implies, is a prediction of the destruction of the canon by the School of Resentment. Bloom asserts that the “Balkanization of literary studies is irreversible,” referring to the creation of new departments of cultural studies, women’s and gender studies, and “professors of hip-hop” in higher education. However, Bloom acknowledges, in referencing Groucho Marx, that he is antagonistic by nature: “Whatever it is, I’m against it!” (486). Bloom then tries to frame his opposition as something ultimately positive. Bloom advocates for the power of reading great literature. For Bloom, “the self, in its quest to be free and solitary, ultimately reads with one aim only: to confront greatness” (489), turning the “Western” canon into a challenge. Bloom wants readers to grapple with the texts he includes in his canon because he thinks such a struggle will enhance the readers’ understanding of themselves and others.

In his final argument against the School of Resentment, Bloom argues against the insistence “that an aesthetic stance is itself an ideology, an insistence that is common to all six branches of the School of Resentment: Feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, Semioticians” (492). Bloom’s political definition of ideology, which is rooted in advocating for a distinct, political goal, is the basis of his disagreement. He does not argue against any given position taken by the “resenters,” but he resents the implication that his own aesthetic values could be the result of his own ideological self. Instead, Bloom turns to the subjective, urging “literate survivors” to use his appendices to “gain the rewards that only canonical literature affords” (494). Again, Bloom avoids fully confronting his own ideological biases, insisting upon the ultimate value of aesthetics without questioning who gets to define aesthetic value in the first place. In this way, Bloom frames the School of Resentment as agenda-driven while presenting his own biases as inherently universal and politically neutral.