From Resistance To Persistence

Saul Bellow is a very important American Jewish writer in the 20 th century American literature,winning many awards in his lifetime including the Nobel Prize for Literature.On the one hand,his works are concerned with universal values.On the other hand,as a Jew,his works are inevitably influenced by Jewish traditional culture.However,some of his works,especially his novellas and short stories are rarely studied.This paper combines literary ethics with Jewish culture to analyze the Jewish ethics contained in his works,hoping to make some contributions to the relatively weak research on Bellow’s works and expand the research field of his works.This thesis mainly studies Bellow’s four short collected stories in the four aspects,namely,Something to Remember me By,The Old System,Looking for Mr.Green and The Bellarosa Connection.Through analysis,it is found that American Jews living in the United States are more or less influenced by mainstream American culture,but they finally resort to Jewish ethics after some ordeals.The first chapter introduces the author and his works,the literature review and methodology of this thesis.The second chapter Something to Remember me By is about how a young man regains his Jewish identity after a series of sufferings,which contains the optimistic ethics that Judaism has always advocated.The third chapter The Old System describes that a Jewish family is facing crisis,after the protagonist experiences the penitent suffering,he readmits the Jewish family ethics,which embodies Jewish inclusive family ethics.The protagonist of the fourth chapter Looking for Mr.Green originally lacks attention to the sufferings of black people,but after some setbacks,the consciousness of social justice awakens him to safeguard social justice,which embodies the Jewish ethics of “loving neighbors as yourself”.The fifth chapter The Bellarosa Connection depicts the changes from avoiding the Holocaust to remembering this tragedy among the American Jews,which reflects the emphasis of memory on Jewish national ethics.Finally,it is concluded that although the protagonists of Bellow’s works are influenced by American culture and deviate from the Jewish culture at first,after suffering various difficulties,they reflect on the current situation and return to Jewish ethics again.