Henderson The Rain King, "jewish Studies

The Jewish writer, Saul Bellow is the most important novelist in the 20th century after Hemingway and Faulkner in America. Although Saul Bellow plays down the Jewish factors in Henderson the Rain King, we still can find the Judaism hidden in this novel. This thesis tries to explore the Judaism in Henderson the Rain King from a cultural perspective. It is divided into four chapters: the first chapter analyzes how the vagrant culture causes the vagrant spirit of the Jewish people and makes it a unique cultural characteristic of the Jews and how this cultural characteristic performs in this novel; chapter two analyzes the Judaism in this novel from the aspect of the religious concept of the Jews; the third chapter analyzes the invisible Judaism embodied in the novel from the aspect of the Jewish ways of thinking; the last chapter explores the Judaism in this novel through Bellow's application of the Jewish cultural motifs. The aim of this thesis is to deepen readers'understanding of this novel and prove that the Jewish culture profoundly influences the writers'potential consciousness and his literary creation.