The Wandering Consciousness In Saul Bellow's Novels

Saul Bellow (1915-2005) is regarded as the most important Jewish American novelists in succession to E. Hemingway and W. Faulkner. His works with the color of Jewish culture help him win the great status in the contemporary American literature. In 1976, Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature for "the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture".As a Jewish writer living in America, Bellow portrays a series of heroes who seek for their foothold in the modern society. The heroes' quest for their homestead in Bellow's works usually takes the form of "wandering", and the wandering consciousness they possess is a very typical feature of the Jewish history and the Jewish culture. There are two types of wandering consciousness in Bellow's works, the physical and the spiritual wandering consciousness. By employing the theory of the cultural poetics advocated by Stephen Greenblatt, this thesis intends to make a cultural interpretation of the wandering consciousness in Bellow's Henderson the Rain King and Herzog.This thesis falls into four chapters. The first chapter probes into one of the cultural resources of Saul Bellow's writings: the wandering consciousness of the Jewry and its influence on Bellow's works. Chapter two makes a detailed analysis of the physical wandering consciousness in Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, and the author holds the view that Bellow inherits the features of the traditional picaresque novel, and breaks through the conventions of the earlier Jewish picaresque novel as well in depicting the physical wandering consciousness of Henderson. The third chapter of this thesis tries to study the spiritual wandering consciousness in Herzog, and holds that the spiritual wandering consciousness as revealed in this novel embodies Bellow's deep concern for the Jews' surviving conditions and his exploration into their spiritual world. In the fourth chapter, the author attempts to depict Bellow as a spiritual wanderer vacillating between the Jewish culture and the American culture, and the author thinks that both the Jewish culture Bellow inherits and the American culture he absorbs exert great influence on his writings. In the conclusion of this thesis, the author concludes that the wandering consciousness in Bellow's works belongs not only to the Jews, but also to the modern Americans. And the wandering consciousness in Bellow's works, both physical and spiritual, reveals Bellow's concern for the surviving conditions and his exploration into the spiritual world of the modern Jews and the modern Americans.