Alienation And Restoration Of Herzog

Saul Bellow (1915-2005) is the outstanding American novelist after WWII and the NobelPrize winner. He has countless works in his writing career as long as sixty years and is famousfor the description of Jewish intellectuals’ alienation. Bellow applies himself to interpret thecontradiction between human nature and living reality. His representative work Herzog gets awide public concern which shows the predicament and destiny of western modernintellectuals. Most critics have a thematic analysis from the perspectives of existentialism,feminism, archetypal criticism; rare of them from the perspective of Fromm’s theory. Thus,this thesis tries to use Fromm’s alienation theory to probe the novel’s theme by analyzingHerzog’s alienation and restoration.This thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces Saul Bellow’slife experiences, his works and the plot of Herzog, as well as the significance of this thesis.The second chapter presents the foreign and domestic literature reviews on Saul Bellowand Herzog. Critics abroad have wide researches on novel’s thematic analysis, writingtechniques, work characteristics and so on. While in domestic researches, existentialism andfeminism are the common uses in thematic analysis.The third chapter is the theoretical foundation of this thesis. It firstly takes a generalreview of the development of alienation, and then introduces Fromm’s alienation theory ofhuman nature and his true love theory for restoration.The fourth chapter and the fifth chapter are the main body of this thesis. The fourthchapter makes a thorough analysis of protagonist’s alienation which embodies on his relationswith society, with others, with nature and with himself, and further reaches the causes ofHerzog’s alienation. The American society and his Jewish background are the inevitableexternal causes. At the same time, Herzog is also burdened by his academic study. Accordingto Fromm’s theory of love, the fifth chapter discusses the protagonist’s restoration from threeaspects of self-examination, true love and nature.The sixth chapter is the conclusion. By this novel, Bellow shows the spiritual crisis inmodern culture and the survival dilemma of modern people, and he tries to find a way neitherescaping from reality nor staying with the ills of the day for Herzog. Thus, people who live indilemma like Herzog should integrate into the realistic world by love with independent sanepersonality, and pursue meaningful life.