A Study Of Polyphony In Humboldt's Gift

Saul Bellow (1915-2005) is a great novelist who has won the honor of American National Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. As an excellent writer who enjoys a high reputation in America, he is regarded as one of the mogul in literature arena after William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Bellow has created many significant works implying profound contents and philosophical thoughts, and Humboldt's Gift is one of the most representative works. The distinguishing artistic techniques have fully confirmed Bellow's extraordinary creating attainments and gifts, especially that the interpretation of polyphony has achieved perfect effect.Humboldt's Gift is a novel of intricate plots,sound logicality and profound implication,which reflects Bellow's outstanding artistic crafts. This thesis begins with analysis of the polyphonic theory and discusses emphatically the features of dialogism, chronotope, unfinalization which are embodied in Humboldt's Gift. Then it reveals the polyphony of the structure,theme and image of protagonist so as to analyze the necessity of polyphony and to explore the artistic value of the novel.The thesis consists of three parts: introduction, main body and conclusion. In the first part,introduction gives a general view of Saul Bellow's life, works,background and content of writing, as well as theoretical framework and main structure of this thesis. The second part is the core one of the thesis. By perusing the text, the author makes a further exploration on the concrete embodiment of polyphonic features. This part interprets the polyphony from the following angles:multivoice, narrative perspective and chronotope. At first, multivoice is mainly reflected on great dialogue and micro dialogue. Next, Bellow's "polyphonic"characteristic widely spreads in the work as flesh distributes in body, which is not only reflected on multivoice, but also on narrative perspective. Bellow gets rid of the dominant author's omniscient narrative perspective in monologic novel, and adopts equal view to make dialogues with readers and hero. Finally, chronotope is reflected on two aspects: the physical time and space, and the mental time and space. As for chronotope, it means the interweaving and co-existence of physical time and space with mental time and space. To manifest the polyphonic characteristic of overlap between temporal and spatial situations, Bellow discards traditional diachronic linear narrative and makes the past, present and future of all events present at the same time and space. The conclusion part gives a brief summary of the overall structure of the thesis and major findings on basis of former analysis.The interpretation of the significant modernistic fiction Humboldt's Gift in Bakhtin's style fully manifests Bellow's extraordinary talents in the creation of polyphonic novel, as well as his profound knowledge of complex society at the turn of the century.