Being Towards Death On Changes In The "Theme Of Death" Of Saul Bellow's Novels

"Theme of death" plays an significant role in American Jewish novelist Saul Bellow's works. The "theme of death" is to be found throughout Bellow's writing career, which is the root of his main characters' anxiety about living and all the more obvious in his long novels and representative works. The final solution to the main character's living crisis in each novel could all be deemed as Bellow's after he has reweighed the "theme of death" during that period. Thus the analysis on the "theme of death" may help us furthur understand Bellow's writing consistency, his major literary themes, writing characteristics and causes. More importantly, when threatened by "death"--the basic living problem, Bellow and his Jewish characters have to activate their deeply-rooted cultural factors for protection, and in this way, the Jewish characteristics in Bellow's fictions have been fully and deeply engraved in the "theme of death". Influenced by many complex factors, e.g., social reality, experiences, the collision and fusion among various cultures, changes in Bellow's "theme of death" have returned more visibly to Jewish tradition.The thesis focuses on three pieces of Bellow's representative works at his middle and late stage. Through close reading and his biography etc, it analyzes Bellow's different ways of portraying the "theme of death", his emphases and approaches to overcoming the fear of death with the aim to showing the persisting anxiety on the "theme of death" and its complicated relation with the Jewish tradition. In Herzog, "death anxiety" is the invisible background of the main character's spiritual crisis, and he has broken through the crisis with the thanatopsis of nihilism; Humboldt's Gift upholds the "perpetual" value and practice of soul, art and love to overcome the fear of death; In Ravelstein, the two main characters have confirmed and returned to their Jewish identity in a plight. These three pieces of works have shown a gradual and "purer" approach in the "theme of death" depiction and the return to Jewish tradition. All of Bellow's Jewish characteristics in writing have been revealed by the novels' common emphases on the current life, individual values, transcendency spirit and the advocacy of the ethic connotation of "memory" and "family".