Unraveling Saul Bellow's Ravelstein Through Deconstruction

A Nobel Laureate and winner of numerous prestigious fiction awards, Saul Bellow has commanded serious attention from a large range of reviewers and critics at home and abroad for many decades. He has made important contributions as a commentator on the American cultural scene, although his foremost impact has been as a novelist. Gloria L. Cronin says,"Bellow's stature in postwar American letters can only be compared to that of Hemingway or Faulkner either in this century"(1).Bellow spent most of his life in universities and colleges where he got a deep insight into the soul of the intellectuals, which in turn was reflected in most of his novels. His works focus on the conflict between materialistic values and the claims of art and high culture, and American writers who despair in their inability to reconcile their artistic ideals with the indifference and materialism of American society. As an American writer and a Jew, Bellow also expresses his Jewish-American consciousness, especially in his later works. His skillfully crafted protagonists collectively exemplify the"Bellow hero,"who is generally a male, urbanite Jewish intellectual. Therefore, he is called a novelist of idea and"a novelist of character rather than plot"(Fuchs 53).In 2000, Bellow published his last novel, Ravelstein. It portrays vividly a charismatic and paradoxical professor, powerful scholar and political philosopher, Ravelstein, who asks his boon companion, Chick, to write a memoir for him. It also provides an account of Bellow's personal recovery of understanding about what it means to be the son of Russian Jewish immigrants in America, the origins of his own Jewish voice, Jewish humor, Jewish anxiety, and Jewish life in the twentieth-century American academy. As a writer working within the Judeo-Christian tradition, Bellow discusses the Jewish question and identity issue most directly and openly in this novel. The novel concludes with the vision of the tropical parrots surviving in the winter landscape. In this death-haunted book, Chick's meditation ends with this heightened moments of revelation that is rich with meanings, including the miracle of Jewish survival in a hostile environment.This thesis is a deconstructive reading of Ravelstein. It focuses on the great-souled man, Ravelstein, meeting up with the commercial society, and the identity issue of Jewish-Americans. It consists of four chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction includes the critical response to Bellow, a summary of Ravelstein and the framework of this thesis. Chapter One introduces the basic theories of deconstruction briefly. Chapter Two examines the sense of absence in Ravelstein. A dysfunctional family and sexual insecurity both contribute to Ravelstein's pervasive sense of absence and lack. His sense of absence and lack is increased by his frequent but futile attempts to discover—or perhaps even create—presence itself. Thus it subverts the metaphysics of presence and absence. Chapter Three discusses the"binary opposites"of Ravelstein. He is really a complex man full of paradoxes, resisting either pole of the system to define himself. Chapter Four explores the identity issue of Jewish-Americans. Deconstruction is all about how one can even be both the same and different simultaneously. This opens up the possibility of multiple and even mobile identities. For Chick and Ravelstein,"As a Jew you are also an American, but somehow you are also not"(23). It is possible for them to be and not to be American at the same time.Finally, with a summary of my major arguments, the conclusion can be expressed this way:"However negative it may sound, deconstruction implies the possibility of rebuilding"(qtd. in De Beaugrande 279). Bellow describes the anxiety in the 20th-century American academy and displays courage, commitment, responsibility-affirmation of the world and life, as well. The survivors of Bellow's generation, once-hyphenated intellectuals and writers, have struggled to achieve their selfhood in the New World. Now they are confident to acknowledge their origins without apology, actually, in triumph. The accommodation is achieved in the end. They can be part of American culture without losing the notion of their Jewish background.