| Among the many great writers in postwar America, Saul Bellow is considered one of the most important. Winner of the Nobel Prize and numerous honors, Bellow is acknowledged as a major American novelist and the inheritor of the place of Faulkner and Hemingway. He devotes himself almost passionately to the searches for a definable self and the attempts to imagine life in the modern society by exposing the social and intellectual issues he is familiar with.Herzog was published in 1964 and is generally considered Bellow's worthiest achievement. The publication of the novel raised a stir in America and remained a bestseller for many weeks. Herzog, which tells an intellectual's experience in the wicked society, his perseverance in the quest for authentic being, and his final recognition of the truth of life, is an embodiment of Bellow's understanding and evaluation of human beings and their lives. The novel not only shows the influence of the ideas of existentialism on Bellow in his evaluation of human condition and their existence, but also exhibits Bellow's own understanding of human beings and the significance of their existence in the modern world. And this is the point that my dissertation attempts to demonstrate.The dissertation consists of five parts:Part One, Introduction. This part gives a brief review of the criticisms on Bellow's novel Herzog and introduces briefly the aim of this thesis. Herzog is the masterpiece of Saul Bellow, which has raised the interests of many readers and critics since its publication. It has won praise for its penetrating and humorous portrait of a Jewish intellectual searching for meaning and selfhood in the anxiety-ridden America of the 1960s. It marks some sort of new development in Saul Bellow's art. Critics... |
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