A General Introduction to Saul Bellow and His Three Novels with a Brief Review of Its Theme Concern 8

Dandling Man is Bellow’s first novel which follows the above mentioned trajectory. The novel is presented as the journal of a young Canadian, Joseph, who is waiting for his induction into the U.S. army in 1942, and who “suffers from a feeling of strangeness of not quite belonging to the world, of lying under a cloud and looking up at it “(DM, 24). This novel established Bellow as a spokesman for the generation of his age during the war. In viewing Dangling Man. Edmund Wilson stated that it was one of the most honest pieces of “testimony on the psychology of a whole generation who have grown up during the depression and the war” (NY, 78-81). The novel as a representative document captures the feelings of men awaiting induction — a symbol of forthcoming disaster. Moreover, it seriously discusses the meaning of identity in the modern worlds touching upon the nature of good and evil, and the possibility of fulfillment. Its journal form immediately reveals Joseph’s isolation and his dangling condition. Commenting on the tons and the style, David Galloway speaks highly of it: “it also stands as a landmark of modern fiction” (MFS, 17).

Seize the Day is one of the great novella in American literature. Many critics and readers have judged it to be a classic in its own time, because of its compressed account of Tommy Wilhelm, who, as he addresses himself a “fair-haired hippopotamus”, is an interesting character in Bellow’s fictions. Bellow depicts the hero as a drowning man who faces complete submergence in failure. He begins his day by plunging himself downward in a hotel elevator to a city which symbolically sinks beneath the sea. He lives in his imaginary world in which “you had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason with yourself at night (SD,84). The major theme is the isolation of the human spirit in modern society. The success of Seize the Day helped Bellow to reach a new stage in his writing career.
If there was ever any doubt about Bellow’s leading position in American fiction, Herzog removed it. The reading public kept the novel on the best-seller 1ist for decades, and the novel is generally acknowledged as one of the most outstanding achievements of modern world fiction. The novel centers on the condition of an intellectual. Bellow’s Herzog is a confused professor who cannot finish his intended book and is definitely isolated from his wives, mistress and his two children. Just as J.D. Salinger, by the middle Fifties, was the literary spokesman of the college undergraduates, Saul Bellow is the favorite novelist of the American intellectuals. Indeed, Bellow presents his protagonist in Herzog as an emblem of the modern American intellectual’s condition. In the judgment of Malcolm Bradbury, it is Bellow’s “most conclusively expressed and densest bock” (SBB, 69), one of “the fullest and most explored presentations of modern experience we have” (CQ, 269).
This paper mainly discusses the protagonists’ feeling of estrangement from others. Therefore, the special weight ought to be given to the exploration into their emotional transaction inside the family as well as within the society. Since Bellow’s fictionalized world is not only peopled by man, but also inhabited by women, there are not only isolated men whose wives either have left them or having gone off on vacation, but also isolated women whose husbands frequently do the same. The character’s feeling of alienation is caused either by specific situation or by his or her own flaws in character.
This thesis is the first detailed and systematic analyses of Bellow’s dominant theme of alienation with the characters in his three generally-acclaimed novels. On the basis of close reading, the thesis endeavors to explore the three aspects of alienation in the three novels with a detached point of view and strives to analyze it from various angels: social, cultural, psychological and marital. At the same time, the thesis also touches upon the protagonist’s inner conflict between the flesh and the soul, the marriage problems, particularly the incompatibility between man and woman.  Furthermore,   the thesis accounts for the protagonist’s final social or psychological partial accommodation to the community.

• PART 1
• PART 2
• PART 3
• PART 4
• PART 5
• PART 6
• PART 7
• PART 8