The Call Of The Human Nature

Issac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), the winner of the Novel Prize for Literature in 1978, is a world-famous American Jewish writer, whose works are initially written in Yiddish. He employs an"impassioned narrative art","with roots in Polish Jewish cultural tradition", not only giving a vivid representation of the Jewish world from the late 19th century to the first half of the 20th century, Jews'thoughts about religion, ethics and life when they were faced with the fate of being massacred, but also bringing"the universal human conditions to life".Singer's works are almost universally focused on how to treat time-honored belief and traditional culture. His stories acutely reflect the sense of loss and controversies when a people abandon its own traditional culture in favor of an alien one. Based on his life experiences of both the two cultures, Singer has put forward his own value judgment and cultural forecast. Singer gives us a panoramic view of the conflict within modern European Jewish culture, the fracture between traditional religious observance and secular accommodation to Westernization at the turn of the 20th century. He not only faithfully mirrors the unique features of Jewry, but also the spiritual experiences of the whole humankind when they are faced with cultural incursions and the issue of the continuity of their own culture.The fictional world of Singer offers the reader a kaleidoscopic view of Jewish life. The reader can get acquainted with people of various shade and description, who often have dual mentalities: on one hand, they are faithful to their religion and tradition; on the other, they have deep-set doubts and confusions about them. As a result, Singer's fictional world is full of binary oppositions, such as good and evil, faith and betrayal, salvation and damnation, through which the extremely paradoxical circumstances involving culture and belief for the protagonists and the great tension within his characters are best presented. This thesis intends to analyze Singer's short stories in light of these binary oppositions as well as Singer's religious thoughts so as to penetrate into the innermost recess of human nature, and to dissect the conflict between humanity and divinity, to explore Singer's concern with the complexities of human nature in the perspective of religion.