Late Bellow and the Literary Scence : Why More Die of Heartbreak Works and Why It doesn't

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Literature and those who assess its value agree on one point concerning reality : its ability to evade definition. Saul Bellow's protagonist in The Adventures of Augie March recognizes this dilemma when he states : "That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of the real"(402). While literary trends continue to introduce new versions of reality, Bellow's fiction continues to pursue the question he first posed in Danling Man, namely-"Where was there a particle [in the decaying urban landscape his protagonist surveys] of what, elsewhere, or in the past, had spoken in man's favor"(24). Saul Bellow, in short, is one of the few contemporary American writers who has remained unwavering in his approach. His success is largely due to the fact that he has been unafraid to emphasize the importance of the "soul' in one's search for the real. In an age of conflicting messages. Bellow remains steadfast in his attempt to discover how one recognizes and then responds to the still, small voice of one's spirit. As Bellow's protagonists often display, well-meaning but ineffectual comic flops far outnumber qualified successes. Take for example Moses Herzog. Here is a man unequipped to deal with the harder edges of reality. What we need, he half-playfully insists, is a "good five-cent synthesis," one that would provide "a new angle on the modern condition, showing how life could be lived by renewing universal connections ; overturning the last of the Romantic errors about the uniqueness of the Self ; revising the old western Faustian ideology ; investigating the social meaning of Nothingness"(Herzog23). While such a powerfully evoked dream causes us to believe Herzog is the right scholar to address this moral dilemma, at the same time we also know that he is unlikely to move his feverish "mental notes" to coherent manuscript pages.