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Faces in a Sea of Suffering: The Human Predicament in Saul Bellow's The Victim

  • Victoria Aarons

Date Published:

5 Jan, 2016

Abstract:

Saul Bellow’s 1947 novel The Victim has as its frontispiece two epigraphs: one from “The Tale of the Trader and the Jinni,” from The Thousand and One Nights, and the other from Thomas de Quincey’s The Pains of Opium. The epigraphs set the stage for Bellow’s protagonist’s anxious reflections about his responsibility toward his fellow sufferers, a moral condition which Asa Leventhal at first attempts to deny but to which he ultimately succumbs. These opening epigraphs — cautionary tales of accountability and moral reckoning — not only introduce the novel’s tensions and ambiguities but also frame the unraveling of Bellow’s fraught and apprehensive central character, whose anxieties about his accountability toward others threaten to become his undoing.

 

January 2016: Victoria Aarons holds the position of O.R. & Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature in the English Department at Trinity University, where she teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust Literatures. She is the author of several books, including A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction and What Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction, both recipients of a Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book. Her work has appeared in a number of scholarly venues, including The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists, and The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction After 1945, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Modern Jewish Studies, Contemporary Literature, Philip Roth Studies, and Shofar, and she is a contributor to the two volume compendia Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work. She is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow, and the forthcoming collections, Bernard Malamud: A Centennial Tribute (Wayne State UP) and Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: The Intergenerational Transmission of Memory, Longing, and Loss (Lexington Books/Roman & Littlefield). Her book, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory, co-authored with Alan L. Berger, is forthcoming from Northwestern Univeresity Press.

 

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 14, issue 1
Last updated on 04/13/2020