Location Of Cultural Identity In Dangling Man

Dangling Man is Saul Bellow's first novel and also the one that has received relatively scant critical attention over the past half a century compared with his longer fiction. This thesis intends to approach this novel from post-colonial perspective and discuss the phenomenon of locating one's cultural identity for Jewish-Americans. Joseph, the protagonist in this novel, possesses double consciousness. On one hand, he is an American and is deeply influenced by the mainstream American culture; on the other hand, he is a immigrant Jew and his latent consciousness of looking for cultural root, memory of childhood experiences and reflection on Holocaust stir up his potential Jewishness that does not identify with the mainstream. The mainstream American ideology intends to homogenize every alien element, while Joseph's ethnic consciousness strives for recognition. These two contending ideological forces have pushed Joseph into a dilemma, thus causing the ambivalence and hybridity of his identity. Through this novel, Bellow expresses his opinions on the location of cultural identity-as an immigrant Jew, it is impossible to maintain a pure cultural environment, therefore one must not be acculturated blindly by host country's culture, and at the same time should not keep a resisting position by tenaciously sticking to his indigenous culture. Instead, he is supposed to embrace the two by cherishing a national sense and absorbing some elements of alien culture to form cultural syncreticity that will enrich one's national culture and make it more enduring. One's cultural identity is just formed in this dynamic process of the dialogue between diverse cultures. This point has certain illuminations on today's globalized world.