The Identification Of A Desiring Subject

Saul Bellow, as one of the most outstanding Jewish-American novelists, is alwaysconsidered as the most important novelist after William Faulkner and ErnestHemingway. His novels always describe the “dangling” living status of the bourgeoisieintellectuals, which in some measures reflects the spiritual crisis of the Americanmodern society. As the first novel of Saul Bellow, Dangling Man, in the form of journal,records the spiritual travel of the protagonist Joseph, and makes foundation for his laternovels. This novel is considered as one of the most excellent war novel though itscontent is far from the war. That’s because it has built an atmosphere of war, the warbetween people and life, and the war between people and themselves.According to the collected materials from both home and abroad, most of themmake a comparative study on theme and protagonist image between Dangling Man andBellow’s other novels, and the research has been mostly conducted from theperspectives of existentialism, cultural belongingness, modernity and post-modernity,and vagrant images. Other analysis specialized for Dangling Man focus on morality andethics, character alienation, the Jewish immigrant culture, and the novel structure.Above all, little analysis on this novel is being conducted from the perspective ofJacques Lacan’s post-structural psychoanalysis theory. Lacan’s post-structuralpsychoanalysis theory is quite helpful to analyze Joseph’s psychological changes.Therefore, this thesis intends to analyze the forming process, the causes of Joseph’spsychological predicament and the solutions to his psychological predicament by usingJacques Lacan’s post-structural psychoanalysis theory, especially Lacan’s three orders,the imaginary order, the symbolic order and the real order.This thesis includes six parts. The first part is a brief introduction to Saul Bellowand his novel Dangling Man, and literature review well. The second part will introducethe main theories of Jacques Lacan, including the unconscious, the mirror stage, theOther/other, and the three orders, namely, the imaginary order, the symbolic order, andthe real order. The third part will focus on Joseph’s self-contradictions in the imaginaryorder, while the fourth part will concentrate on Joseph’s contradictions with theenvironment in the symbolic order. In the fifth part, this thesis will analyze Joseph’sunconsciousness in the real order to disclose his real desire and his solution to thosecontradictions. And the last part is the conclusion. Through the analysis of the six parts, this thesis aims to disclose how Joseph to redefine his identity in the society. Joseph isthirsty for freedom, but he doesn’t know how to make use of it when he gets theso-called free life. On the contrary, the so-called free life becomes a burden on him. Hereflects on himself every day and tries to find the meaning of life. Through a series ofcontradictions with both inside and outside world, Joseph realizes that the real freedomis not free actions, but the free soul based on the social rule, which is helpful to inspiremodern people to think how to identify themselves in the modern society.