The Progress Of The Self

Saul Bellow (1915- ) is regarded as one of the most important living American novelists. He was rewarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, which established him as a representative figure in contemporary American Literature and a vanguard of contemporary fiction in the wake of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Bellow has continuously sought the individual's becoming and authentic being by focusing on the ordinary interior agonies and conflicts in the hearts of the main characters in his novels.The Adventures of Augie March, acclaimed to be one of Bellow's most important representative novels, demonstrates the novelist's preoccupation with the individual's formation and the safekeeping and maintenance of the unique self. Like most Bellow's other works, Augie March shows an amazing perseverance both in his quest of the ultimate truth and in his endeavor to work out his individual fate. Like most of other protagonists, Augie is mercilessly plunged into a spiritual crisis wherein his self is disintegrated and his identity forfeited as a result of his own failings and the cruelty of the society. Augie March's adventures can be interpreted as the process of the formation of the young man. As an American youth, Augie is optimistic and hopeful as early American Adams at the outset, but soon he encounters the bewilderment and anxiety in his formation, which is Existentialist as the writer is influenced by the contemporary movement inAmerica. The bewilderment and anxieties force him to leave home and dangle in a void. He is adventuring in order to find his authentic existence. In the adventures he happens to find the significance of authentic existence and gain the courage to be. At the end of the novel Augie longs for being a "catcher in the rye", which symbolizes the hero's returning home. All in all, though Augie encounters with anxieties in his growing up, he keeps a high mind and keeps on struggling for the authentic existence and consequently he is triumphant. The dissertation, from an Existentialist point of view, attempts to demonstrate Augie's spiritual progress from anxiety to alienation, from negation to affirmation, from despair to hope. It is the progress of the self in formation, the progress of the self of an American in the contemporaneity of its author. Through its argumentation, the dissertation aims at analyzing Augie's growth with Existentialist standpoint. Through this perspective, the protagonist's agony in the wicked society, his perseverance in the quest for authentic being, and his triumph in reaching the destination is fully and vividly displayed.The dissertation consists of five chapters.Chapter One, Introduction, analyses that The Adventures of Augie March is of bildungsroman and hence it involves the issue of the progress of the self in the modern era. It presents an analysis of the major aspects predominant in the character of Bellovian hero and the predominant trend in the philosophy of Existentialism expounded by Sartre, Camus, Nietsche and others. Thus it contends that the progress of the self is Existentialist, which makes the novel endowed with salient Existentialist texture.Chapter Two, Angst of American Adam, scrutinizes the absurd world around Augie, the process of Augie's loss of his Adamism, and the hero's confrontation with the world by tracing Augie's journey from the jungle of concrete to the jungle of nature and then from the jungle to the concrete. Then it points out that the self of the hero is alienated from the world due to the anxieties of his experiences. Because of the reason that the protagonist can not comprehend the world, he embarks on the spiritual adventures-his withdrawal from the society. It is the phase that the hero has troubles and leaves home. The tension of the novel is commenced and fulfilled by the confrontation between Augie's innocence and American cruelty in the formation of the youth. Part One analyzes Augie's experiences or adventures in the society and is astonished by the absurdity of the society. To the innocent American young...