A Challenge for the Hero to Demonstrate his Personal Worth as well as his Faith in Humanity in Saul Bellow’s Novel, The Victim

Saul Bellow connected one novel after another with a representative Jew, in order to represent Jewish experience itself. The emphasis on one people's collective idiosyncratic experiences is so intense that it seems to follow from some deep cut in Saul Bellow’s mind. As a novelist, Saul Bellow encounters an urban world where individuality maybe ironized or displaced or sapped by dominant processes and laws of society. Bellow feels that environment is a determining power over man. The assertion of the self or an act of will, are dominated by the laws of social placing. Saul Bellow’s heroes, usually intellectuals, often writers and men concerned to discern what he calls in his novel The Victim, the queerness of existence face constant victimization and defeat. They are unable to rid themselves of the feeling that they inhabit an oppressive society whose forces run counter to their aspiration for well-being. They are obsessed by the thoughts of persecution, death and madness. Their anxiety for self-preservation insulates them at least initially against all views of reality other than their own. Repelled by ordinary life, they invent evasive formulae to confront imagined terrors and support their own marginal existence. Reality, however outmatches all their maneuvers, forcing them to come out of the barricades they have built around themselves and to accept the fact of belongingness to a common world.