The World Of Herzog And The Cultural Dilemma Of Contemporary Western World

With the death of Saul Bellow, one of the spokesman of American Realism, on April 5, 2005, his works and life draw attention once again of the whole world. And his masterpiece Herzog is regarded as the best one which represents"Bellowian style". They try to interpret the work from different points of views. While in China, most scholars focus their attentions on the depresses and perplexity of the intellectuals to expose the civilization CRBB in western world; some scholars try to summarize the Jewish ness outside of the work, while some others regard it as the best representative work of existential philosophy. But this is not completely true. As we all know, Saul Bellow is a realist writer as he pays great attention to the reality of the modern life and is concerned about the present state and prospect of the society and history; he is also a writer with deep philosophical thinking as he is concerned about not only the individual existence and ultimate value of human beings, but also the influence of social moral standards to the existence reality of human beings. He is a modernist writer because he probes into the inner world of the modern people in his work and expresses it in his unique way to obtain an unexpected but effective result. He is a comic writer, for his work obtains a kind of ridiculous effect by his self-satirizing. In addition, he is not only a Jewish writer but also a writer of the world because his works reflect the spiritual dilemma of the modern people from the point of view of Jewish intellectual.And those elements are embodied in his work Herzog, so this thesis unfolds Herzog's world by the synthesis of all the elements.The present thesis includes 4 parts plus introduction part mainly introducing the plot of the novel Herzog, Chapter Two summarizes his comic writing techniques with satire and introduces the important position of the letter in the novel from two aspects of content and form. Chapter Three covers the importance of letters by analyzing its contents and forms. While Chapter Four deals with the blurriness of Jewish identity of Herzog and comes to conclusion that his passion and spiritual crisis is in fact the common situation of modern people. And the last part is the conclusion.The whole paper encircles the works'text to outspread. In the traditional view, the sceneries一of Herzog are unbelievably easy. Bellow is only aiming to state a common domestic love-affairs—how Herzog's wife, Marling, abandoned him and fornicated with his trusted friend Gasberche . To fill up a great deal of interspaces of the framework is not only the considerable details and departed experiences of a professor in a university, but the rational thoughts and discussions about the existing circumstances of human being, and just the Hamlet-type thinking makes him slip into the abyss of confusion.Herzog's life was torn to pieces and he had to endure the extreme depression, and even he himself considered his life as painfulness, so he made continuous complaints. Bellow uses a unique comedic technique to deal with this sort of discontentment, Herzog just using the way of sneering at him and others to keep the balance in psychology. In the chapterⅡof this paper, how Herzog tried to break away from his depression via sneering is fully discussed. Nevertheless, he had to admit that the mordancy satire was just a way to deceive him and didn't alleviate any pain. So he managed to compromise with the realistic world and conceals himself to rehabilitation, and waited the moment to resume his research of soul. Undoubtedly,"letters"are the light spots of the masterpiece. A good many scholars have mentioned this characteristic in their works, but they lay too much emphasis on the content of the letters then neglect the application of the"letters"as a writing technique. In the third chapter of this paper, it has been discussed how Bellow takes advantage of these"letters"to undertake the boundless thoughts of the dramatis personae, and how the author uses it as a writing technique so smoothly. The hundreds of letters have the advantage to express the feelings; on the other hand, they make the dramatic persona find an opening to auto catharsis. Otherwise, these letters break through the limits of time and space, the dramatic persona not only writes letters to the alive also the dead, and he writes letters anytime and anyplace; They may be in literal forms or only a draft in his mind, may be long to thousands of words or short to a sentence, but these letters which were never concerned format were never mailed, to our amazement. Now that they can't succeed in communicating,They seem like the doodles of soliloquy. Such frank letters occupy half length of the book, which shows Bellow's originality, and makes the Saul Bellow live masterpiece.Eventually, the characters in most of Saul Bellow's works are Jew or Jewish intellectual because of his unchangeable Jewish ness. This is the reason why the depiction of the hero and heroine reflects a representative Jewish ness, more or less, even sometimes without consciousness. For example, the original appearance of the vagrant in novel can trace down the drifting and vagrant history of Jew. Also, it is common plot, even to the point of being a habit for the suffering and torture of the heroes in his works, which reflects the suffering experience in Jewish history. Bellow can't get rid of the effect of being Jewish heritage. Although he thinks that it is not his responsibility to describe Jew's fate. The Jewish tradition can be found in his sub consciousness. However, being the second generation of Jewish of immigrant, he attaches little importance to Jewish tradition, which causes him to deal briefly with the issue of representative modern American by decreasing the effect of being Jewish ness for the heroes. In Herzog, Bellow explains the suffering experience of Professor Herzog in the point of view with humanity, which is also the basic point for him to reveal inner torment of heroes. The Jewish ness of the novel in his depiction can become any representative American, which is the reason that he makes the reader get familiar with Herzog and his character in the reader's real life. Bellow portrays intellectual as common people in our life by getting away the traditional passive elements we identify them with. The quest for self-chase and exploration with strong determination in order to get rid of the puzzle that proves us the mighty strength of human. It is this kind of humanity that helps people transcends personal and ethnic human nature.Above all, we should not treat Herzog's inner world with wide vision, but it paves a wider way for the people who want to find a brand-new way to explore this never, which may be quite different from traditional prejudice.