Faces in a Sea of Suffering: The Human Predicament in Saul Bellow’s The Victim

Abstract

Saul Bellow’s 1947 novel The Victim has as its frontispiece two epigraphs: one from “The Tale of the Trader and the Jinni,” from The Thousand and One Nights , and the other from Thomas de Quincey’s The Pains of Opium . The epigraphs set the stage for Bellow’s protagonist’s anxious reflections about his responsibility toward his fellow sufferers, a moral condition which Asa Leventhal at first attempts to deny but to which he ultimately succumbs. These opening epigraphs — cautionary tales of accountability and moral reckoning — not only introduce the novel’s tensions and ambiguities but also frame the unraveling of Bellow’s fraught and apprehensive central character, whose anxieties about his accountability toward others threaten to become his undoing.