The Conservative Message In Saul Bellow’s Post-Nobel Novels

Saul Bellow(1915-2005) is regarded as one of the greatest authors of the 20 th century in America. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in literature, and the National Medal of Arts and is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times. Breaking the usual and boom-bust routine for most creative writers,Bellow did not stop writing after becoming a Nobel laureate in 1976. Since the 1980 s,Bellow’s novels have been produced in the context of the American Culture Wars, which divided many intellectual elites into two distinct groups – the comparatively progressive New Left who, guided by various postmodern theories, actively asserted the need for equality between genders, races and cultures, and the comparatively conservative intellectuals who emphasized the core values of mainstream American culture. This thesis argues that Bellow expressed a clearly conservative message in his later novels published after 1976, namely, The Dean’s December(1982), More Die of Heartbreak(1987) and Ravelstein(2000), and this message speaks of the conservative stance that Bellow held in the American Culture Wars.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is the introduction. It begins with a summary of Saul Bellow’s life and works, and an overview of critical studies of Bellow’s novels. Then it introduces some of the arguments in the American Culture Wars as the theoretical framework of the thesis. Finally, it explains the purpose and organization of this thesis. Chapter Two offers an analysis of The Dean’s December. This chapter mainly presents an examination of Bellow’s attitude towards communism as a social system practiced in East Europe. He points his finger at the problems of poverty, corruption, crime and totalitarianism, which threaten the well-being of its residents on a daily basis. ChapterThree offers an analysis of More Die of Heartbreak, which negatively portrays several women who pursue their desires and goals but bring heartbreaking disillusionment to the love-seeking male intellectuals, to examine Bellow’s disparagement of the feminist movement. Chapter Four presents an analysis of Bellow’s last novel Ravelstein. By showing the conflict between science and literature, it demonstrates Bellow’s aggressive defense of liberal humanism and his criticism of postmodernism. Chapter Five is the conclusion in which it is contended that, although Saul Bellow, due to his Jewish background, has for a long time been seen as automatically siding with the New Left in the Culture Wars, a study of his post-Nobel novels clearly points to the conservative message that he seemed to be communicating, and that conservative message speaks of conservative cultural stance that Bellow held after he became a Nobel laureate.