What Is Saul Bellow's Criticism In Herzog

Each of Bellow’s novels reads like an autobiography. Each autobiography is of a different life. Bellow’s novels are not stories whose lives have been chalked out, and the chapters simply colored in: they are a process of discovering, revelations which are incomplete for the author as well, until the last page is reached. . In Herzog he succeeds because his central character is so much, so familiarly, the prey of the absurdities against which he wrestles. From the beginning of the novel, Bellow emphasizes the dichotomy between body and spirit, and between reason and emotion. Herzog is Bellow’s most successful attempt to synthesize idea and personal reality, since its protagonist’s struggle is definitely a struggle for synthesis, for order,

He has come to his prominence slowly through a careful building up of a body of work, an oeuvre displaying greater insight, range of power, with each new novel. Since his appearance on the literary scene in the mid-forties, Saul Bellow, recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize for literature, has left his mark on the international literary world. His writings, which combine prophetic wisdom with human comedy, have always elicited extreme response: reverence or condemnation. He is one the few contemporary authors who has been able to sustain the interest and dominate the field of academic and scholarly inquiry for over four decades. His fiction typically addresses the meaning of human existence in an increasingly impersonal and mechanistic world. Writing in a humorous, anecdotal style, Bellow often depicts introspective individuals sorting out a conflict between the Old world and the New world values while coping with personal anxieties and aspirations. Saul bellow has been a most persevering chronicler of America’s restless search for a definable self, articulating more common needs and ills of American society at