Existentialism and Freudian psychoanalytic theory provide explanations of alienation. Basically, the existentialist view point is a sense of meaninglessness and lawlessness in the outer world. As soon as the man is given birth, he is thrown into an absurd, cruel situation and has to fight for his being. Coldness, hunger, illness, accident are hidden beside him all the time and ready to gulp down his life. So after the baby has left his mother’s body, he is immediately driven into never-ending anxiety. When he begins to understand things, someone else will strive to control him. Father wants him to be his ideal son. Teacher wants him to be a student by his standard, while wife, an appropriate husband by her taste. Many of us grow up by others’ standard, ideal, taste. Serving others, we never know our true qualities. Only self-consciousness and determination not to be directed by others can obtain our own existence. Then through free choice can he create his own essence. Society engulfs self and alienates man as tool. Why are men forever hostile to each other? Existentialism provides the answer: deficiency is the perpetual environment of human beings while each one tries to fulfill his own desire. This situation leads inevitably to scrambling among human beings. The state of alienation in which men are hostile to each other is absolute, eternal.
The Freudian theory of three psychic zones provides bases for human being’s self-estrangement. According to this theory, in each one’s brains there are “three little children” quarrelling, that is, the id, the ego, and the super ego. The id is the reservoir of libido, the primary source of all physic energy. It functions to fulfill the primordial life principle, to obtain satisfaction for the instinctual needs in accordance with the pleasure principle. Naturally, the id knows no values, no good and evil, no morality. It is always asocial, amoral, lawless. Its function is to gratify our instincts for pleasure without regard for social conventions, legality, ethics, or moral, restraint. It can do anything bad. So the ego serves to govern the id. The ego regulates the instinctual drives of the id by the reality principle. On the one hand, it functions to meet the demands of the id; on the other hand, it serves to repress the drives of the id, being afraid that the id will go far beyond the acceptability of the society. Therefore man has the feeling of being cut into two halves. The id is not content to be repressed, and man lives in an age of nameless anxiety. The individual suffer a loss of self, becomes a victim, sometimes a rebel. Here, in this paper, the term “alienation’’ is used in the following three senses: (1 social alienation .Society is indifferent and hostile. There are displaced persons everywhere. They have the feeling that they occupy the place that belongs to another by rights. They either remain passive or take actions not by their own will. They regard themselves as the victims of society. (2) the character’s feeling of estrangement from others. Men are detached from others. They are spiritually estranged from the physical world including wife, lover, children, and others who are around them. No mutual understanding exists between them. They are isolated and lonely. Either society rejects them or they alienate themselves from society by their own sense of right and wrong. They find no home to return to. They belong to everywhere and yet nowhere. 3) the character’s consequent feeling of self-estrangement. Because of their inability to take actions, to make decisions, they feel they are out of touch with themselves. They are torn by the conflict between reason and emotion, soul and flesh. They dangle, doing nothing basic to cope with their problems. Thus they are in endless search of their ideal self, their identity. Since it is impossible for this thesis to cover all of Bellow’s novels, the present authors, therefore, mainly bases her discussion on Bellow’s two early novellas, Dangling Man and Seize the Day, as well as his masterpiece Herzog.
In the three novels mentioned above, the basic pattern of the protagonists’ development is somewhat the same. Each novel begins with the protagonist who dangles and accidentals or deliberately, falls into isolation. He then goes through a number of painful experiences, finally coming to the realization that he cannot achieve his objective in terms of self-realization, virtue and the good life. Towards the end of the novel he resolves to accommodate, no matter whether he is permanently determined or not.
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