A Study Of Seize The Day In Cultural Perspectives

Seize the Day is one of Saul Bellow's famous novellas. This thesis intends to approach this novella from double cultural context, Jewish culture and American culture. This novel not only reveals the problems of Jewish people through all their history, but also reveals the dilemma of the whole western people, which is also Bellow's contribution to the world literature in his Seize the Day.From Jewish cultural perspective, nearly every character is physically and spiritually in exiles and in the influence of the Holocaust. From American cultural perspective, Tommy, the protagonist fights for his American dream while he never succeeds as a real American. Meanwhile the characters especially Tamkin have been influenced by American Transcendentalism such as Emerson's individulism, Emerson's opinion about soul and his ideas about the present and past. Cultural assimilation is reflected through clashes between Jewish culture and American culture and between barbarousness and civilization. Seize the Day conveys the universality. In the revision of Seize the Day, Bellow omitted The Star of David, a symbol representing Jews. Universal theme is reflected through the description of alienated situations of characters in Seize the Day. In a word, Seize the Day is beyond the ethnicity and reflects the whole world's dilemna.