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The most notable characteristic of Saul Bellow's fictional
protagonists is their suffering. They struggle for the salvation
of their souls in the world of distractions, but always find
themselves dangling between heart and head, the material and the
ideal, reality and dream, identity and entity, present and past,
Jewish tradition and American modernism, failure and success,
and especially, between life and death as they progress from
alienation to reconciliation, and from chaos to order. The
intention of this study is to explore an intellectual's suffering
from human existence in modern society and show how Bellow's
heroes struggle for redemption through love and identification in
Herzog and Humboldt's Gift.
The dangling condition is Bellow's heroes' most significant
characteristic, by which Bellow manifests the difficulty of
transformation. Yet Bellow believes in the divinity of the
individual, who has the ability to overcome obstacles and to
determine his own destiny. He also believes in the worthiness of
life and affirms the possibilities of a meaningful individual
life. It is a positive approach to existence. And we sense in
the tone of his work a spirit of hope.
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