Spiritual Journey of Protagonists in Saul Bellow’s Fictions: Search-Escape-Regeneration

Abstract

Saul Bellow, the author of Herzog, became first American Jewish writer who won the Nobel literature prize in 1976. His works changed the dominant American literature led by Hemingway and Faulkner and opened up another new era of American literature. There are many discussions among critics in the literary world, and the conclusions reached were not all the same. Some critics started with his writing techniques and believed that his novel inherits and integrates the two traditions of modernism and realism and want to classify it as a category of Western Marxism. Some apply to ethical literary criticism and make an analysis of human-nature and human-self relationship in his works. Even some critics believe that this novel distorts the image of women from the feminist point of view. This paper aims to analyze three of Saul Bellow’s famous fictions, Herzog, Henderson the Rain King, More die of heartbreak from the perspectives of the spiritual evolution of the protagonists. David Galloway (1996) suggested that Bellow had only written one book from six different points of view which convey the common psychological journey of the protagonists in his works. (P138)