Henderson The Rain King As An Epitome Of Modern Individuals' Existence

As a Jewish writer, Saul Bellow and his works are inevitably influenced by the traditional culture of Jewish people and modern western philosophy. Bellow receives the existential thoughts, and his novels are full of existentialist color.Bellow is one of the most outstanding novelists in contemporary American literature and his novels show his unique understanding of human existence. Bellow is regarded as the most important writer after Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. For his literary contributions, Saul Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for literature, for "the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his works" in 1976. He was also awarded the National Medal of Arts. Bellow is the only writer to have won the National Book Award three times.Henderson the Rain king, published in 1959, is one of the masterpieces of Saul Bellow. In this novel, the writer creates a hero who is a millionaire and wants to escape his chaotic life by taking a trip to Africa and searching the true meaning of life. In this story, the writer intends to present us the problem in modern society:people's spiritual crisis and people's alienation. Many critics have adopted different methods to unscramble this novel in multiple perspectives. For example, the famous literary critic Ihab Hassan said that, of Bellow's entire novels, Henderson the Rain King possesses the largest, freest sense of life. Saul Bellow himself also points out that Henderson is "the absurd seeker for high qualities". Therefore Henderson the Rain King is worth studying. Through analyzing the novel, the thesis paper interprets Saul Bellow's perspective of existentialism. In the main body of the thesis, the author of the thesis analyzes modem people's alienation and confusion reflected in the main character Henderson who is an absurd seeker for authentic existence and also analyzes the reality of modern society revealed in the chaotic world in Henderson the Rain King, and gets a conclusion that Henderson the Rain King is an epitome of modern individuals'existence.Saul Bellow is greatly influenced by existentialism. In his novels, Bellow always creates alienated heroes. These alienated heroes strongly feel the absurdity of existence. However, human alienation is not the aim of Bellow's writing. In his works, he wants to explore how the modern human beings are searching for the place to exist in the chaotic and realistic society. Just like the performance in Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow convinced that, it is not proper to escape from the reality or to go with the madness age and the final way to transcend the reality is to move from alienation towards harmony.