On The Narrative Time In Humboldt's Gift

Saul Bellow(1915– 2005)is an American author, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, one of the major representatives of Jewish-American writers. In 1975, he published his novel Humboldt's Gift in which he, for the first time, portrayed the main character as a literary artist. In this work, Bellow shows his concern---the status of the artist in the modern technocratic-business world. Therefore, it is important how to analyze the two characters as artists in the novel from an appropriate angle or aspect. Further analysis suggests that it is feasible that the analysis of main characters as artists can be realized through using the theory of narrative time so as to reveal their status in the modern society.This essay consists of three parts: introduction, the body and the conclusion. The body consists of three chapters. The first chapter deals with the employment of objective time and its effect in Humboldt's Gift. The second chapter discusses the employment of psychological time and its effects in the work. The third chapter is concerned with the sense of rhythm in time in terms of duration and frequency in the novel.The different narrative layers perform different functions. The employment of objective time records the changes of the social reality during the four decades and the lives of the two artists in the novel. The effect it achieves demonstrates the influence of social reality on their writing talents and their fates---victims of artists to the modern society. The employment of psychological time makes it possible to blend forward motion with reflection and its effect displays vividly the artists'contradiction between the dream of benefiting humanity and the desire of achieving excessively both fame and fortune. The sense of rhythm in time helps further to give prominence to the unfortunate fates of the artists and their innermost conflicts that reveal the questions Bellow attempts to raise to people: What is the appropriate relationship between artists and modern society? What is artists'role in modern society? This deepens the thematic significance. The last part is the conclusion that the employment of narrative time in the study on the two artists presents well to the readers their conditions and their roles they played in the modern society.