An Archetypal Study Of Henderson The Rain King By Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow who got the Nobel Prize for Literature is widely regarded as one of the 20 th century’s greatest writers. His writing exhibited the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, and drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation. Henderson the Rain King is a good example. Its blend of philosophical discourse and comic adventure has helped make it one of his most enduringly popular works.Archetype is visible or sometimes symbolic representation of the human physical and psychological experiences amassed over hundreds of thousands of years ago. It is an inherited and collective psychology. Archetypes are visible. They can associate the isolated pieces of work together. An archetypal criticism is used to explore the essence of a work through the analysis of the repeated, symbolic and conventional motifs, images, characters and so on. The analysis of Henderson the Rain King from the perspective of archetypal criticism is a process of humanistic self-recognition. The question that Bellow wants to explain in this work is how humans conquer the anxiety and fear of death as well as the serious quest of the hero about it. All the archetypes embodied are related to death and birth which are human’s physical experience. Physical death is not fearful because it is natural. Spiritual death in a wealthy society is the most terrible. The process of a human’s life is to quest. Continuous quest from different aspects makes life more significant.Structurally, this paper consists of four chapters. Chapter one is the introduction of the life and works of Bellow, the definition of archetype as well as the development of archetypal criticism. Chapter two presents the archetypal exploration of the main characters and images. Chapter three is about the exploration of archetypal events which contains death rebirth and quest. Chapter four summarizes the main points of this thesis and dwells on the significance of the use of archetypes.