Soul Requires Strength

Saul Bellow (1915-2005), a Jewish-American writer, is a crown of literature of the20th century. Throughout his whole life of creation, Bellow’s concern is unswervingly with the issues of human race. Being in a magnificent scale, his works markedly fall into two parts with a sign---Herzog, pre-and-post which different writing styles and thematic orientations are presented. His later works, with Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift and Ravelstein as masterpieces, give us a more and more distinctive thematic expression, that is, the pursuit of the ultimate value---freedom. The three works respectively stand for three stages of Bellow’s theme formation:Introspection, Reflection and Sublimation and appear to be correlative. Compared with other works with such a theme, Bellow gives his freedom unique content and his own writing features. Firstly, the notion of freedom is developed with vulnerability and mortality. Secondly, Bellow strove for the restoration of real life through his elaboration on the notion of freedom by means of his character settings and spatial imagination.What Bellow attempts to show us is a journey to the soul which is introverted and with a purpose of strengthening human soul. His thoughts exhibit themselves with a sense of depth and transcendence. When put into the vision of cultural comparison, Bellow’s introversion and anti-rationality coincides on a large dimension with ancient Chinese free thoughts. Meanwhile, the vertical transcendence contained in Bellow’s successive works would be valuable supplement and sources of reference to us.