| The peculiar tension present between male and female in Saul Bellow's novels demonstrates the failure of love in his fictive world. A pattern of doomed love and cooled passion permeates the relationships of couples. This dissertation suggests that the protagonists, despite all protestations to the contrary, neither like nor respect women. Other critical approaches to Bellow's couples have been only partially successful because they do not probe beneath the psychodynamic surface of Bellow's couples. If we remember that the characters are fictive and that the author chooses his material to bring order and aesthetic satisfaction to the work of his imagination, then psychoanalytic techniques, used here, offer a legitimate approach to the explication of the difficulties between men and women.; Since the early manifestations of family dynamics determine the son's future relations with the essential women in his life, the hero's family matrix is reconstructed to the fullest degree possible. Such an analysis shows a pattern to emerge, a family myth. The son is overly fond of the shadowy, loving mother and wishes to overthrow the father. He is ambivalent in relation to the father, who remains both hero and tyrant in the mind of the son. Nevertheless, the family exists in the memory of all Bellow protagonists as a vigorous, vital force. He is nostalgic for childhood, for never again does he feel so alive and confident as he did with his parents. But one parent or another is always missing in Bellow's world; in reality, Bellow depicts a world in which the family structure is disintegrating. Unable to resolve the Oedipal conflict, the hero seeks his mother in all his relations, but cannot find her. Since he reserves his tender feelings for the lost mother, the protagonist rejects a sustained loving and caring relationship with any woman. Ultimately he chooses freedom, not attachment. These psychological insights illuminate Saul Bellow's hidden themes. |
