『험볼트의 선물』에 나타난 죽음과 영원성 : 유대적 관점에서 A Jewish Interpretation of Death and Immortality = Humboldt`s Gift

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Humboldt's Gift stands on the same thematical line of the seven previous novels. The gift secures Humboldt a finacially comfortable life, and it triggers Citrine's reflection on his original self. But the most important gift is Humboldt's life and death itself, because it serves as a metaphorical mirror of Citrine's potential fate, and as a guide for his recovery from death anxieties and his spiritual quest for immortality.
The process of Citrine's recovery begins when he returns to Chicago, "Land where my Jewish fathers died," where he acquired a Jewish sensitivity growing up in a Jewish family and a Jewish society. He remembers all the beloved people of his past, and wants to communicate with the dead, with Humboldt in particular. And with the help of Steiner's anthroposophy he learns to overcome his life-long death anxieties and believe in the immortality of the soul and in the participation in the eternal as "the individual in the general." His Jewish sensitivity makes it easy to accept this belief. Finally he reburies Humboldt and his mother, and finds a spring flower in the fallen leaves, symbolizing the eternal succession of individuals and their immortality in the common divinity given by God.
In Humbodt's Gift, Bellow seems to affirm "Jewish transcendentalism" and the conviction that human existence is rooted in and takes its directions from a shared "bond" of the common divinity. These ideas recurred in his previous novels, such as The Victim, Seize the Day, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet. But this novel focuses on the spiritual and mystical side of the ideas.