The Choice of his Own Planet Over the Moon and Reason Over Lunacy in Saul Bellow’s, ‘Mr. Sammler’s Planet’

Of all the American – Jewish writers who have poured forth their creative efforts, none has achieved more recognition from his literary peers than Saul Bellow. Born in Quebec in 1915, raised in Montreal and Chicago, he received a trilingual heritage of Yiddish, English and French. The Yiddish culture, Bellow‟s protestations to the contrary, permeates all his writing. He has become the great success that all his less popular and less materially successful Yiddish compatriots tried for, yet failed. Bellow represents the generation of American – Jews where secular education was not only as good as their Gentile neighbors, but whose digestion and interpretation of American culture was markedly superior. Armed with this treasure of knowledge, yet familiar with a Yiddish tradition that still resonated in his inner ear, Bellow possessed every gift for success, and every success was realized. All Bellows‟ works indicated his gift for understanding and describing the acute condition of humanity. From Chicago (Adventures of Augie March, 1953) to Africa (Henderson, The Rain King, 1959) Bellow explored the themes of alienation, loneliness and man‟s bewildering quest for knowledge and spiritual discernment. Reading Saul Bellow is an education into the mysteries of the universe, taught by a fellow Jew, whose mission of the possibility of human greatness and the penchant for human failure is singularly distinct and penetratingly clear. Mr. Sammler‟s Planet is Saul Bellow‟s most Jewish novel, in that he uses a theme and characters from recent Jewish history, namely The Holocaust and these Jewish protagonists and dilemmas become vehicles for Bellow‟s most forceful defense of humanism.