English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Zendy Open

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Insights

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Zendy Tools

Zendy Plus

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

In all of his work Saul Bellow has been concerned with the nature of individual identity in the mass-culture of the modern absurd world. His analyses of the quest of modern man for a meaningful existence in a postwar world which has lost all traditional values are based mainly upon the influences of two widely different - indeed even contradictory - philosophical schools. Keith Opdahl has pointed out that Bellow writes partly within the American Romantic literary tradition, and partly he adopts, and Americanizes, the theses of French existentia1ism.l This duplicity of philosophical adherence is employed throughout his fiction2 and Bellow seems to have adopted it in an attempt to compromise between the two contradictory world views which have been predominant in the Western world since Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. In this article I shall be concerned only with the influence of French existentialism on Bellow's work. Jean-Paul Sartre is the principal exponent of French existentialist philosophy, and it is mainly his work that has given Bellow inspiration for his novels. In his deliberate rupture with the metaphysical world view of the Middle Ages, Sartre maintains that existence precedes essence 3 : Human beings exist, but what they are or what they may become depends entirely upon what they themselves choose to do. They must take the responsibility for their own development. Sartre makes a fundamental distinction between:

Existentialism and Saul Bellow's 'Henderson, the Rain King'