Order Lost And Order Regained

Saul Bellow is a well-known Jewish novelist in contemporary America.He has won a series of awards,including the National Book Award,the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature,and has attracted widespread attention from critics and readers.Bellow has always kept a watchful eye on the reality of human society and explored the predicament of human existence.Bellow has often said that the artist's purpose is a moral one,and ethical and moral questions are at the core of his works.As one of Bellow's masterpieces,Mr.Sammler's Planet mainly describes the three-day life of the protagonist Mr.Sammler in the American society of 1960 s.Some scholars have paid attention to the loss of ethical order of American society in the1960 s described in the novel,and affirmed Bellow's positive ethical orientation from the selection made by the protagonist in the chaotic society,but they have not paid attention to the multiple ethical identities of the protagonist and the influence of such ethical identities on his ethical selection,leaving room for the study of this thesis.Based on the theory of Ethical Literary Criticism put forward by Professor Nie Zhenzhao,the thesis aims to study the multiple ethical identities of the protagonist and his ethical selections under the influence of his identities,so as to excavate the ethical value of the novel.The main body of the thesis is composed of three chapters.The first chapter analyzes the multiple ethical identities of the protagonist Sammler in different periods of time and in different ethical environments: a British intellectual,a victim and survivor of the Jewish Holocaust,and a refugee and outsider in American society.The second chapter examines the ethical environment of American society in the 1960 s from the perspective of Mr.Sammler's outsider identity,and analyzes thelack of morality and the loss of ethical order in American society from four aspects.The third chapter,combined with the protagonist's multiple ethical identities,mainly discusses the protagonist's ethical selections on how to regain the ethical order under the influence of different ethical identities.As an outsider in American society,the protagonist could not bear the chaos of American society and the disorder of the earth,so he chooses to escape and flee to the moon.And Sammler analyzes the benefits of escaping from the earth and fleeing to the moon—the simple life on the moon could calm down the madness and evil,and the ethical order might return.However,personally,the protagonist who has experienced the Jewish Holocaust,is always full of ethical concern for the state of human survival,and is filled with moral responsibility of an intellectual to maintain social ethical order.The protagonist who has climbed out of the dead does not choose to escape,and he does not despair of human society and still remains optimistic about the future way out of human existence.Therefore,he chooses to face the ethical environment of loss of ethical order,and to reconstruct ethical order on the earth.Through the analysis of the protagonist's ethical selection,Bellow's optimistic ethical orientation is presented in the thesis.Bellow endows the protagonist Sammler with the ethical identities of a British intellectual and a survivor of Holocaust.Under the influence of such identities,the protagonist will not choose to escape but shoulder the moral responsibility given by the identities.In Mr.Sammler's Planet,Bellow denounces the madness and disorder of American society in the 1960 s and calls for the reconstruction of ethical order.Bellow's reflection on social reality is also of referential significance to today's society.In the 21 st century,people still need to be alert to the disorder of society and shoulder the moral responsibility of maintaining ethical order.