Identity and the Social Self in Saul Bellow's Novels: A Socio-psychological Reading

Abstract

This thesis attempts a fresh look at exploring the troubled relationship between the ‘true self’ and the ‘social self’ in the American society. The question of self versus society is repeatedly fictionalized in the narrative world of the Jewish-American novelist, Saul Bellow (19152005). Bellow is quite aware of the individual’s conflict between his true

self and social self. Truly, Bellow’s individual immigrant experience as a

Jew living in an American community is one essential factor that affects

him

in dealing with the subjects of his fiction and in portraying the struggle of his protagonists. Often Bellow’s characters are JewishAmerican

whose identities are shaped within the American culture. Hence, the subject of my study is the emergence of the self, not the Jewish self in particular. Bellow has been drawn to the suffering, the alienated, the paranoid, and the divided heroes regardless of ethnicity and religion.