Saul Bellow has been something of a resident alien among recent American novelists. While his work is soaked in American experience, it does not appear to develop out of the tradition of any of his immediate predecessors in American fiction. He has said some kind words about Dreiser, but he is not a direct descendant of Dreiser or of any of the other naturalists. His work does not emerge out of the generation of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, nor does it spring from the social realism that Bellow grew up with in the thirties. Critics, trying to locate Bellow in a literary context, usually link him with French or Russian novelists or with a Jewish tradition that is not specifically American. While Bellow has certainly been more cosmopolitan than most American novelists, he has not simply turned away from the American tradition. From the beginning of his career, he has consciously tried to avoid what he sees as the extremes of the modern American tradition and at the same time to contain those extremes as the central conflict within his own work. (p. 462)
On the surface [the] cosmic gloom and the simultaneous obsessions with self-perfection and power [characteristic of naturalist and realist fiction] may seem paradoxical…. [The] extreme pessimism on the dark side of Calvinism has always co-existed with an American version of the romantic quest for self-perfection. It is just these polar extremes which have held Bellow's attention throughout his career. He not only sees them as the shaping forces of American literature but of American history and culture as well. Most importantly he sees them as the continuing terms of conflict within the American psyche. While Bellow rejects both orthodox optimism and orthodox pessimism, both the idea of human impotence and romantic striving after self-perfection, the tension between these contrary forces supplies much of the drama of his work. His minor characters are for the most part grotesque incarnations of one or the other of these extremes. His central characters contain these extremes as the terms of their psychological conflicts. It is here that Bellow's efforts to create an image of the human self can best be seen in relation to the naturalists and realists. Bellow's heroes contain both the heroic self and the ordinary self. (p. 464)
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