Saul Bellow Research Articles

An Analysis of the Protagonist’s Behavior in <i>Herzog</i> from Yi-Fu Tuan’s Escapism

The novel <i>Herzog</i> by the American writer Saul Bellow has received wide attention since its publication in 1964. It centers around the protagonist Moses Herzog’s life after his second divorce, in which he is often in a state of uneasiness, going from place to place to avoid problems, writing unsent letters to express dissatisfaction, seeking comfort from others when in trouble, and losing himself in memories when frustrated. According to the Chinese-American humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s escapism theory, the behavior is in fact escapism. What Herzog really wants to escape is society, others, and himself, and escaping from place to place or person to person, and creating material world and spiritual world, are the different ways of his escapism. And during the process of escape, with embarrassment, pains, impulse and constant self-introspection, he gradually gains strength, and evolves from negative escapism to positive escapism, temporarily achieving reconciliation with reality. There are many reasons for Herzog’s escapism, among which his American Jewish identity, the turmoil of the American society in 1960s, the decline of the intellectuals’ status and the rise of feminism at that time all play a key role. Herzog’s escapism is actually a product of his time, a process of reconstruction of relationship between male and female, and a seeking-existence journey of an intellectual with different ethnicity in American society, with positive escapism born out of negative one.

From Legislator to Experts: The Decline of Intellectuals in Ravelstein

Anti-intellectualism is rooted in American historical tradition and has gradually become the most prominent social trend in American society. The rise of anti-intellectualism is also the process of changing the role of intellectuals. With the popularity of anti-intellectualism, authority possessed by intellectuals gradually weakened, not only authority over knowledge but also authority in power mechanism, which ultimately led to intellectuals constantly seeking role transformation. From the aspect of anti-intellectualism and role transformation of intellectuals, extreme egalitarianism inherent in anti-intellectualism and populist politics has expelled intellectuals from being legislators. After being legislators, intellectuals transformed into interpreters, but the interpreter was impacted by division among intellectuals and conflict between intellectuals and the public caused by anti-intellectualism. As anti-intellectualism intensified, intellectuals’ chosen role as experts was unable to cope with the overall anti-intellectual atmosphere of society. Based on Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein as a model, this paper will discuss how anti-intellectualism has affected the transformation of the role of intellectuals regarding social phenomena as well as the characters depicted in the novel.

Opposing Friendship: Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift

Abstract This article reads Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975)—a novel best known for its fictionalized portrait of the writer Delmore Schwartz—according to a conceptual sympathy between friendship and the novel. Though such a twinning can illuminate Bellow’s career as a whole, I argue here that Humboldt’s Gift represented his most compelling and complex attempt to reckon with opposition as an artistic problem (and opportunity). In 1962, Bellow published an essay talking up the importance of managing ‘opposites’ within a novel and, in his novels of this period, he alludes to an aphorism of William Blake’s: ‘Opposition is true friendship’. This statement, to begin with, fairly encapsulates the volatile relationship between the central characters of Charles Citrine and Von Humboldt Fleischer, but in this article I also interrogate the manifold ways in which an understanding of friendship as oppositional can illuminate mid-century theorizing about the novel as being fundamentally structured by oppositions. More idiosyncratically, Bellow recruits these sympathetic conceptions of friendship and the novel in pursuit of a quasi-gnostical synthesis whereby two exceptional friends might escape the indignities and mysteries of material existence. Elements such as the compositional record of Humboldt’s Gift, the influence of Blake’s Romantic ‘Contraries’, and Charles Citrine’s embarrassed enthusiasm for the ‘anthroposophy’ of Rudolf Steiner demonstrate a mutualistic intimacy between friendship and the novel. Friendship, that is, enlivens the novel with its varieties, flexibilities, and bantering confrontations; the novel, in turn, offers an indispensable forum for scrutinizing the duties and demands of friendship.

The Conflict between Individuals and Society in Seize the Day

This paper explores the existential problem in Seize the Day—the conflict between individuals and society in modern society. With a brief introduction of Saul Bellow and the novel, the paper emphasizes the analysis of the conflict and the sources of the conflict. Besides, Saul Bellow uses many rhetorical devices to intensify the conflict. The analysis of these rhetorical devices is beneficial for us to interpret and understand the true meaning of the novel. Through the study of Bellow’s vision and the novel’s metaphorical meaning, we may find an effective solution to the conflict that our human being is involved in, and realize the social values of this novel.

The disappearance of Allan Bloom

AbstractIn humanities departments across the country Allan Bloom is condemned and reviled—but for what misconduct? The present investigation into our distorted view of Bloom begins by reframing his transgressions. Bloom has offended eminent philosophy professors by boosting students' desire for a philosophic education. He has emboldened promising young people by teaching them to bear up under the deforming forces of convention and corruption and edge their way towards the question, ‘How should I live my life?’ A philosophic education as Bloom sees it ‘means precisely helping students to pose this question to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not a continuous concern’. The philosopher's interests are not shared by most people. Hostility to philosophy is the natural condition of man. This surprising fact, plainly stated, invites so much anger that Bloom—standing in for the philosopher—is forced to defend himself. The story of Bloom, like Socrates', gives an account of philosophy's emergence, distinctive features and always imaginable suppression. Plato's artful writing captured Socrates' way of life for posterity. This essay explores the nature and function of Bloom's bestselling book The Closing of the American Mind (1987), as well as the purpose of Saul Bellow's final novel, Ravelstein (2000), a fictive account of Bloom's life and death. Together these books amount to the true Apology of Allan Bloom.

From Zurishaddai to Menachem Mendel: The Shlemiel’s Journey from Ancient to Modern Israel

Abstract This essay explores the evolution and resilience of the shlemiel, a central figure in two millennia of Jewish culture. Rooted in biblical narratives, the shlemiel transitions eventually into a symbol of Yiddish and Eastern European diasporic life, embodying both comedic and tragic elements. Tracing his journey through cultural history, from German to Yiddish and modern Hebrew and American literature, theater, and film, the essay delves into the complexities of his character, rooted in folklore and revolving around mistaken identity. Themes of gender and sexuality, along with interpretative acrobatics add layers of ambiguity and complexity, shaping the shlemiel’s narrative in various literary and cultural contexts. Through a detailed analysis of works by authors ranging from Heinrich Heine through Sholem Aleichem, Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, to Sammy Gronemann, the essay demonstrates the shlemiel’s versatility and enduring presence in Jewish comedy. Moreover, it examines his role as both a pariah and an agent for social change, reflecting on his significance in different cultural landscapes, as he lands eventually in America and Palestine/Israel in the 20th century. By exploring adaptations and interpretations across time and place, this essay highlights the shlemiel’s resilience amidst shifting societal norms across the globe, offering insights into the enduring relevance of this iconic figure in Jewish literature and culture.

From Zurishaddai to Menachem Mendel: The Shlemiel’s Journey from Ancient to Modern Israel

Abstract This essay explores the evolution and resilience of the shlemiel, a central figure in two millennia of Jewish culture. Rooted in biblical narratives, the shlemiel transitions eventually into a symbol of Yiddish and Eastern European diasporic life, embodying both comedic and tragic elements. Tracing his journey through cultural history, from German to Yiddish and modern Hebrew and American literature, theater, and film, the essay delves into the complexities of his character, rooted in folklore and revolving around mistaken identity. Themes of gender and sexuality, along with interpretative acrobatics add layers of ambiguity and complexity, shaping the shlemiel’s narrative in various literary and cultural contexts. Through a detailed analysis of works by authors ranging from Heinrich Heine through Sholem Aleichem, Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, to Sammy Gronemann, the essay demonstrates the shlemiel’s versatility and enduring presence in Jewish comedy. Moreover, it examines his role as both a pariah and an agent for social change, reflecting on his significance in different cultural landscapes, as he lands eventually in America and Palestine/Israel in the 20th century. By exploring adaptations and interpretations across time and place, this essay highlights the shlemiel’s resilience amidst shifting societal norms across the globe, offering insights into the enduring relevance of this iconic figure in Jewish literature and culture.

The Face of the Future: An Affective Mental Time Traveler in Saul Bellow’s “A Father-to-Be”

ABSTRACT This article focuses on a future-oriented Janus face portrayed in Saul Bellow’s short story “A Father-to-Be,” arguing that it builds an exceptional prospective fictional mind in Bellow’s writing with a great emphasis on emotion. Drawing on the “Janus hypothesis,” the article examines how the protagonist’s emotional and imaginative mind interprets the past and processes the present based on a gloomy anticipation of the future, while some previous literary studies on the memory-imagination cognition emphasize the imaginativeness of memory. Affective narratology is largely involved as the supportive explanatory framework in the analysis of the narrative style. The authors approach the structure of the entire story by regarding it as an emotion story and attempt to reveal the aesthetic value of its core narrative by taking emotion both as the force of character forming and as rhetoric.

Teeth as Metaphors in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King

Teeth as Metaphors in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King

Saul Bellow’s Gothic Ontology: The Victim and More Die of Heartbreak

Abstract: Saul Bellow’s “Gothic Ontology: The Victim and More Die of Heartbreak ” examines the different types of Gothic employed by Saul Bellow in The Victim (1947) and More Die of Heartbreak (1987). The article argues that in The Victim Gothic doubling becomes erased by an idea of hospitality which challenges the status of the Gothic “other.” This is contrasted with More Die of Heartbreak where the Gothic is used in order to critically read the psychological and emotional damage caused by a materialist culture. The article explores Bellow’s complex engagement with the Gothic and examines how he employs the Gothic to raise questions about ontology and materialism.

פובליציסטיקה ישראלית לנוכח ביקורת מוסרית-פוליטית ביצירות של סול בלו ופיליפ רות

This article examines a representative case of Israeli publicist responses to the moral-political critique by American Jewish authors, focusing on the reception of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet. These novels were first published in Hebrew translation in the early 1970s, against the backdrop of a heightened mythologization of Israel in the American Jewish mainstream and concurrently with Israel’s early occupation of the West Bank. Roth’s and Bellow’s works include some highly unflattering images of Israeli militancy and chauvinistic nationalism. Israeli literary critics tended to respond to the authors’ moral-political critique by framing it as inauthentically Jewish or as incorporating non-Jewish influences. In this way, Israeli responses sought to undermine the validity of the authors’ critique by implying a framework of Jewish identity in which Israeli culture was symbolically preeminent. Ultimately, this tendency demonstrates how the subterranean struggle between homeland and Diaspora has informed and infused the conversation among the two Jewish communities with respect to contemporary Jewish ethics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“You Had to be a Crank to Insist On Being Right”: Saul Bellow’s Comedy

“You Had to be a Crank to Insist On Being Right”: Saul Bellow’s Comedy

The Game of Spiritual Ecology and Spiritual Wasteland

More Die of Heartbreak, a postmodernism novel by Saul Bellow uncovers a grey and gloom picture, in which people in postmodernism period are intoxicated by fragmented emotional purchase, losing spiritual belief. By using the theory of Eco-Aesthetics, this essay intends to research on the life and image of the protagonist Bain, or Kreidel. The essay draws a conclusion that the novel, centered with some ecological images like trees, plants, etc., sketching his inner world—plant utopia. He experienced a process from isolation, alienation, loss to protest, and to departure. Entertaining a desire for plant paradise, an ideally sacred land, the hero is engaged in a sun-game with the age of desire around him. Luckily, he realized his dream, thus stimulating his life upward.

Saul Bellow in Utah: “Leaving the Yellow House”

ABSTRACT Saul Bellow wrote “Leaving the Yellow House” with a setting in Utah although it is based on his sojourn in Nevada in 1955 and 1956. The location at Sego Desert Lake is historically significant in relation to the theme, which concerns economic networks of exchange, notably gift exchange (potlatch). Central to the narrative is the treatment of native Americans, past and present, and the gifts they gave to the early Mormon settlers, which rebounded upon them. The protagonist, a self-styled pioneer who relies on gifts that come back to haunt her, is a woman and one of the few in Bellow’s fiction to turn her back on money and status and negotiate an identity outside intellectual and material frames.

Compelling Reasons

Compelling Reasons Tim Thornton, MA, MPhil, PhD, DLitt (bio) There are many compelling reasons to have an interest in the philosophy of/and psychiatry. In 1994, when persuaded by Bill Fulford to walk down the corridor at Warwick University to join in his teaching of what seemed a newly developing subject—against my protestations that I knew nothing about mental health care—my main interest was in the irreducibility of meaning to the 'realm of [natural scientific] law,' in Sellars's phrase. This had the bonus of complementing Bill's championing of the irreducibility and centrality of values in psychiatry. (It was only later we realized we disagreed about the not inconsequential issue of whether norms and values were subjective preferences or objective features of the world.) It seemed plausible to me that the irreducibility of the space of reasons to the realm of law might have interesting consequences for psychiatry. But mine was a purely disinterested academic interest. This is perhaps the usual approach to what is in part a professionalized academic subject with its formal rules for publication and dissemination of research. It has only been in the last decade that I have experienced things in a more personal way, following what I would term, though psychiatry would not, a nervous breakdown. My image of a breakdown came from reading Saul Bellow's novel Herzog. The titular Herzog has been left by his wife, cruelly, and retires from academic life to write letters. For example, to Heidegger. "Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression 'the fall into the quotidian.' When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?" I thought I would be able to maintain some sort of inquiring mind and write experientially grounded philosophy of psychiatry as a catharsis. I could study my own illness. This immediately proved a ridiculous hope. As a philosopher with a cognitivist bent—language, thought, and intentionality being guiding interests—I had always assumed that madness was only really a matter of what Jaspers calls 'primary delusions,' belief-like states that strain their belief-status, are hard for others to make sense of, and occur only with particularly severe forms of mental illness. But madness is also a matter of doing, saying and feeling as well as pure reasoning. What I would, previously and disinterestedly, have described as a dysregulation of emotional reactions turned out to transform my entire experience of the world and my ability to think rationally about it. I lost the ability to put my experiences into words. In truth, I lost all interest in that project. Only when not distressed could I take a view on my loss of world. Distressed, I did not understand myself. This is a neat illustration of epistemic disjunctivism. But it also highlights a challenge for, and some of the brilliance in those who have contributed to, the philosophy of mental health care, through their expertise by experience. While experience may be a necessary condition for particular forms of expertise, my own case reveals that it is not sufficient. Further, even an everyday and familiar mental illness (like my own) can render the articulation of experience, in a way that makes sense to others, very much harder. Hence the fact [End Page 11] that there is a thriving mental health service and patient movement, making their own experiences available to others combining first-person narratives with conceptual and phenomenological insight is both admirable and helps to set a part of PPP's future agenda: bringing first-person experience within a philosophically and clinically informed discipline. [End Page 12] Tim Thornton Tim Thornton, MA, MPhil, PhD, DLitt, is Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health and Mental Health and Deputy Head for Research in the School of Nursing at the University of Central Lancashire. As well as contemporary philosophy of thought and language, his research concerns conceptual issues at the heart of mental health care. He has published research papers on clinical judgement, idiographic and narrative understanding, the interpretation of psychopathology and reductionism and social constructionism in psychiatry. Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press

Philip Roth and "My American Gang"

Philip Roth and "My American Gang" Gustavo Sánchez Canales (bio) What does it mean to be a roth scholar in spain? to answer this question, I refer to "my American gang," a term I use among my university colleagues in Spain when I discuss my research. Obviously, this name is inspired by Roth's 1971 satirical novel about President Richard Nixon. However, I hasten to clarify that the similarities between both "gangs" begin and end in the title. Here, I reference my American gang to tell the story of how international scholarly collaborations have advanced Roth Studies, and I reference my work in the context of these collaborations as an example of the archive we have built collectively, internationally, to further an understanding of Roth's work around the globe. I should begin by saying that Jewish American literature has been at the core of my personal interests since the 1989-1990 academic year, a time when I was about to finish English Philology at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). I had a professor of English and American Literature named Cándido Pérez Gállego who was one of the very few teachers who analyzed the works of writers like Henry Roth and Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Cynthia Ozick, among others. Thanks to him, not only did I then start to delve into their fiction, but it was also clear to me that I would write my dissertation on Bellow. However, I soon realized that exploring the works of such a complex novelist entailed a lot of research in several areas. Bellow's complexity is somehow reflected in the title of my dissertation—"Literary, Philosophical and Religious Influences on Saul Bellow's Novels"—which I defended in June 2001, and obtained cum laude. (My postdoctoral research focused on Bellow.) I do not think I can be accused of revealing a state secret if I say that twenty years ago—let alone during the late 1980s—Jewish American literature was not a "hot topic" in Spain. Despite this—or perhaps because of this—I was determined to publish part of my research in Spain. After all, if Pérez Gállego had succeeded in instilling in me a love for this literature, why could I not try something similar in other forums at a national level? In 2003, Isabel Durán (UCM) and [End Page 95] José Antonio Gurpegui (Universidad de Alcalá, Madrid), as editors of their online Historia crítica de la literatura norteamericana, invited me to contribute an essay for their issue "La tradición judía," which was published the following year. In this essay I examine first- and second-generation writers such as Malamud, Roth, and Bellow. The publication of my first Bellow papers in the early 2000s motivated me to focus part of my research on Bellow. Among others, I would like to highlight "Saul Bellow as a Novelist of Ideas: A Forum" (2016)—a special issue co-edited with fellow Roth Society member, Victoria Aarons—which appeared in Partial Answers (Johns Hopkins UP-The Hebrew University of Jerusalem). There were two other contributions: "A Tale of Two Cities," published in Saul Bellow Journal exactly one decade after "Life, Death" and "Bellow's Cityscapes" included in The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow (2017). In both cases, Victoria Aarons, to whom I am deeply grateful for inviting me to participate, was editor. Chronologically speaking, Bernard Malamud is the second writer to whom I am greatly indebted. My first Malamud essays date from 2006. Specifically, "Bernard Malamud's Russian Background" came out in the Spanish journal Mundo eslavo. Two years before, I had been invited to contribute a book chapter ("Racial Tension, Rage and Destruction in Bernard Malamud's The Tenants") for a Festschrift that also appeared in 2006. This special volume was meant to be a tribute to Angela Downing, at the time a recently retired professor from the Department of English Philology (UCM), the same department where I had been working for years. As in the case of "La tradición judía," I thought this Festschrift could be a good venue for continuing to promote Jewish American Studies...

Reading Philip Roth: Primacy Effect, Authorial Intentions, and the Writer's Extended Mind

Reading Philip RothPrimacy Effect, Authorial Intentions, and the Writer's Extended Mind Pia Masiero (bio) Reflecting on my first encounter with philip roth is a tricky matter. We all know that there is no such thing as remembering things as they indeed were because memories serve different functional purposes and are, thus, inevitably, the result of narrativizing moves. The problem concerns the possibility of returning to the moment of previousness, to the first eventful crossing of the threshold of the first book. The context of that first reading emerges against the context of my writing this piece now. This latter erodes and problematizes the founding necessity of the former because it has narrativized it to look like a sort of prologue of my story as Roth's reader. The prologue, thus, bears the signs containing the seeds of future development, which happens to be the very core of the narrative that makes the retrieval impossible. In this disheartening circularity, there might be one way to retrace the phenomenology of that eventful first encounter. What I set out to explore in the following pages may be condensed into one question: what kind of reader did Roth's books allow me to be? This question touches upon the most obvious of facts: I have met Roth as a reader. Yes, I was privileged enough to be present at his eightieth birthday in Newark in March 2013, to shake his hand and have my two-minute glorious exchange. Still, Roth is essentially, quintessentially, I should say, the man behind the words I can read and reread on the pages of his books. His words, thus, and only his words, are the tangible presence I can deal with; when speaking about novels, words are the phenomenon, as Martin Heidegger put it, the showing-itself, "that which does the announcing, that which in its showing-itself indicates something which does not show itself" (53). This is the field of phenomena, the world, that my readerly consciousness discloses, or rather, following Edmund Husserl, "the corresponding subjective experiences in which we become conscious of [the world or the things], in which (in the broadest sense) they 'appear'" (qtd. in Gallagher 1). The words on the page disclose—and [End Page 111] continue to disclose every time I read—the world that Roth is, which does not show itself but is both contained and evoked in the words he chooses for every sentence in his thirty-one novels. Back to my first encounter, then, keeping this frame in mind. I read my first Roth novel—The Human Stain (2000)—during the Louisville Summer Institute on Contemporary American Literature in 2005. The third installment of Roth's American trilogy was meant to contribute to drawing a literary map of the Contemporary American literary landscape. Coleman Silk's ode to the "raw-I" (805) and his destruction at the hands of forces greater than his pioneering individuality was part of a heterogeneous syllabus that included, among others, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Guillermo Gómez Peña. This is—in itself—worth pondering: on the one hand, Roth reached me with his twenty-second book, well past the conflicting relationships with his Jewish community and into his major phase; on the other, he crossed my path together with a melting pot of writers and not through a genealogy of Jewish American authors, as the junior to two formidable elders, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud. Be as it may, The Human Stain was my first encounter with a Roth novel: a Zuckerman book presenting both the apotheosis of Roth's immersion in American history and his obsession with narrative matters. I was far from knowing and understanding the underpinnings of Roth's masking practices; nonetheless, it was clear to me that this was a book about a writer's handling of his materials at least as much as it was a book about memorable, intrinsically opaque, characters trying to find a usable sense of themselves against an overpowering, larger than life, American history. The opacity of the so-called other minds came to me as the singular predicament of Nathan Zuckerman, a writer who tackles it...

A Professor of Roth in India

A Professor of Roth in India Gurumurthy Neelakantan (bio) My introduction to the fiction of philip roth began with the purchase of Goodbye, Columbus (1959) from a second-hand bookstore on the Kanpur campus of Indian Institute of Technology in the mid-eighties.1 I was then a graduate student pursuing research on the fiction of Saul Bellow. While Bellow's interviews and the secondary literature on his fiction gave a sketchy idea of the novelistic concerns of Roth, it was not until I read Roth's Goodbye, Columbus that I began to realize the author's compelling voice. Having finished my PhD in the late eighties and settling in a good academic career, my next few years saw me engage with the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Cynthia Ozick, Tillie Olsen, and Grace Paley. Sometimes it surprises me that I did not revert to Roth in that period, considering how entranced I was by Goodbye, Columbus. The impetus to pursue Roth's fiction did not return to me until the summer of 1992. During a visit to the Indian Institute of Technology Madras library, I was browsing through the pages of the latest issue of Modern Fiction Studies and chanced upon an essay on Roth's The Counterlife (1986) by Debra Shostak. A felicitously written and thoroughgoing postmodern analysis, Shostak's essay as much rekindled my interest in Roth as a desire to become a good scholar like herself. Rediscovering Roth through Shostak, I immediately bought The Counterlife, Deception (1990), The Ghost Writer (1979), and My Life as a Man (1974). For someone who loves the nineteenth-century realist writers, I was myself a bit surprised to be taken in by the various postmodern games that Roth plays in The Counterlife. I also realized that Roth is a postmodernist with a difference in that, for him, reality is neither a construction nor "real" enough. Subsequently, I located in an anthology edited by Malcolm Bradbury Roth's fine essay "Writing American Fiction" (1961), which argues this point with nuance, and it clarified my own thinking on the debates underpinning modernism and postmodernism. As part of my intellectual journey with Roth's fiction, I experienced a certain self-reflexive moment in March 2013. Attending the Roth@80 event in Newark, I participated in a symposium on "What we talk about when we talk about Philip Roth." Many of the American newspaper reporters who covered the event were curious to [End Page 91] know what drew me to the fiction of Roth in the first place and why I considered him at the time—as I do now—an important international novelist. That question really knocked me down. Giving me an opportunity to examine my own life, it helped me to assess where Roth fits into it. While I discovered Roth through Bellow, the fact remains that Roth's fiction has held a mirror to my own life experiences. Reading Roth's visceral and uncanny experiences of everyday life, I often find myself struggling against a normative cultural tradition much like his protagonists. If I'm fascinated by Bellow's take on life as a pilgrimage, I am more drawn to Roth's dramatization of the conflicts that assail the soul of the protagonist in his journey. In reading Roth, I have been able to understand my own conflicts as a Brahmin caught up in the riptides of modernity. Much like the Jewish tradition, the Brahmanical tradition privileges strict religious observances and a certain otherworldliness that eventually translates into insularity. Thus, my preoccupation with Roth's fiction has its genesis in a curious cultural story. While my connection with my tradition is coherent, it is no less characterized by ambivalence and irony much like Roth's stance towards his Jewish origins. In negotiating an identity in the interstices of a living tradition and an equally laudable modernity, I have learned to look for inspiration in Roth's novels that mine a Jewish male's identity negotiations in the New World. More than any other writer from the West or even from my own Indian literary traditions, Roth singularly speaks to me—often illuminating my beliefs...

In Medias Res

In Medias Res Ross Berger (bio) EAST COAST CONNECTION I grew up in a rural suburb of Hartford, Connecticut, about 35 miles away from Philip Roth's home in Warren. Charlotte Hungerford, in nearby Torrington, served as Roth's hospital for standard care for a better part of four decades. I was born there in the 1970s. Warren is located in Litchfield County, the northwest section of Connecticut, known for its remote beauty and two-hour drive to Manhattan. The latter, along with the area's woodsy calm, is why it has been a popular residential destination for many luminaries in the performing arts and literature, including Meryl Streep, Mia Farrow, Arthur Miller, William Styron, and Terrence McNally. Roth's name would be included among this list when proud Litchfield County residents rattled off its bona fides: "Bucolic and peaceful…" "Home to the first American law school…" "Plenty of celebs including…" I never once saw Philip Roth when I set foot in Litchfield County, and believe me, I was on the lookout in my early twenties whenever I was on break from college or grad school. But he was a man who protected his privacy dearly, so I tempered my expectations—eliminated them actually, as I was accustomed to doing (more about this later). I'd like to think I spotted him in person one Saturday evening in July 2000, among an exodus of participants of Midsummer Night Swing, a weekly summer-long "outdoor dance party" at Lincoln Center. The glut of people around me made it impossible to verify. Perhaps it was a random accountant who bore a resemblance to the great author. Or maybe it was Moishe Pipik, Roth's fictional doppelgänger from Operation: Shylock. Or maybe—no: likely—it was just wishful thinking. For a couple of years after that evening, I had tried to draw connections to Roth any way that I could, but to no avail. I didn't know anyone who went to Bucknell or University of Chicago in or around the time he did. And I had no publishing network to speak of. [End Page 119] The closest I got, which is not close at all, is my New Jersey story—a slight echo of American Pastoral through my mother, a native of Trenton. Her brother, my uncle, was a high school athletic star and war veteran just like American Pastoral's Swede Levov, who once hailed from a city bigger than Trenton—Newark. My uncle was slightly younger and served not in Korea like the Swede, but in a different conflict in the Pacific (Vietnam). Both were Jewish, physical, mythic. Both married non-Jews. Both could assimilate in either Jewish or gentile crowds, and, in either, be idolized and accepted as one of their own. Alas, these details are not unique or special in America's most populated state per square foot. It's just that American Pastoral is a deeply relatable fiction. If I must admit the obvious, my true connection to Roth has been as a reader. In this role, I found consolation as a student dealing with the long aftermath of a family tragedy and, once more, as a young writer in need of basic guidance. During each of these times, Roth served as a comforting sage-on-the-page, whose words were radar through the fog of trauma. WORDS OF HEALING I came to Roth's work after an on-again-off-again journey of reading Saul Bellow in my mid-to-late teenage years. It started when I studied Henderson the Rain King for a term paper in my tenth grade American Literature class. From a list of authors typed likely on an IBM Selectric (this was 1992, mind you, well past the era of the typewriter), I chose Bellow because of two descriptors next to his name: "Jewish" and "Nobel Prize-winning." (Admittedly, the former was the bigger enticement after months of reading nineteenth-century works with strong Christian overtones and Lost Generation novels rife with anti-Semitism.) I did not take to Henderson the Rain King. Finding it too tame and, at times, culturally exploitative, I moved on to Dangling Man and Seize the...

Existential Freedom in Saul Bellow`s Dangling Man

This paper intends to answer to what degree the characters in Saul Bellow`s Dangling Man live based on freedom within existential philosophy. As Existentialists believe, each individual is solely responsible for giving meaning to life. These human beings, through their consciousness, create their values and determine a meaning to their life. This paper bases its theory mainly on Jean-Paul Sartre`s Being and Nothingness and Heidegger`s Time and Being, which concern being, freedom, and responsibility, and on other relevant theorists who discuss existential freedom and the being in life. The concept of freedom which is of primary importance to philosophers from the beginning of life is discussed in Dangling Man, where a character like Joseph struggles to win his freedom by going to war and leaving his life behind. For him, the war answers his questions and promises him an identity and self. Joseph could be argued as an existential individual who lives based on his freedom of choice and action.