The Survivor in Contemporary American Fiction (An Old and Rare Book)

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About The Book

After the First World War, American novelists such as Hemingway Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Nathanael West portrayed in their novels weak and broken human beings who upheld their disbelief in human life and dignity. The trend continued after the Second World War and created a widespread belief that American fiction was essentially peopled by victims of social circumstances. However, American novelists' negative view of man witnessed a positive change under the various social, political, literary, and philosophical influences in the beginning of the 1960s. Consequently, Ellison, Wiesel, Kosinski, Heller, Bellow, Malamud, Kesey, Vonnegut, and John Updike portrayed the protagonists who valiantly fought against the dehumanising forces of society and emerged as survivor heroes.

Following the introduction surveying the growth of human self in American fiction from the 1920s to the 1980s, this interesting and up-to-date manuscript breaks the age-old myth of the victim in American fiction. It offers a new conceptual study of Saul Bellow. Bernard Malamud, John Updike, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. tracing the various images of the survivor in their novels. In the successive four chapters devoted to each of the writer's major works, the manuscript provides an in-depth analysis of the writer's themes, characters, and techniques for a fuller comprehension of the reader. An immensely readable and rewarding study, the manuscript concludes with a discussion of the survivor as a symbol of peace and universal brotherhood in contemporary society.

The exhaustive bibliography at the end gives a useful information about the primary works of the four novelists and the secondary scholarship on them.

About the Author

Sukhbir Singh holds an M.A. (English) from Punjab University, Chandigarh; an M.Phil. from Himachal Pradesh University, Simla; and a Ph.D. from the Central University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. He has been teaching English in Osmania University, Hyderabad, since 1982. He has published over two dozen research papers on American fiction, British poetry, and British novel in Indian and American journals. He was given the Olive I. Reddick Award by the Indian Association for American Studies for his essay "The Survivor Hero in Malamud and Bellow" in 1978. He has recently coedited Literature and Popular Culture: A Festschrift for Isaac Sequeira; his collection of Interviews with Saul Bellow will appear shortly. Currently, he is writing a book on Culture, Ideology, Text: Treatment of Violence in Contemporary American Fiction. He has participated in several workshops, presented many papers in seminars and conferences, and given several guest institutions.

Introduction

Towards the Image of the Survivor

While writing about the novelists of the Lost Generation, John Aldridge made a rather disheartening speculation that "the best literature in America will continue to be negative so long as the country's values are such that no writer of honesty or insight can possibly take them seriously." Aldridge expressed his apprehension about the future of American literature in the beginning of the 1950s when American writers were still pursuing the thematic trends and narrative techniques employed by their ancestors in America and France during the 1920s and the 1930s. And he made the above observation precisely keeping in mind the negative view of man projected in the novels of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and E.E. Cummings, who had lost their belief in the innate potentials of man and the positive values of life under the impact of the First World War. These writers portrayed in their novels weak and broken human beings who suffer, like their creators, from the tragic sense of despair, disbelief, and disillusionment. But, Aldridge's contemplation soon became untenable, at least in the case of American fiction, when it suddenly took a new turn in the beginning of the 1960s.

The American novelists in the 1960s discarded the country's values of despair, disbelief, and disillusionment in favour of the positive values of hope for future, belief in human life, and respect for human dignity. As a result, the problem of man's survival in the face of the complex social conditions of our time became the chief thematic concern for the major contemporary American novelists. They projected in their novels man set against the overwhelming odds of his chaotic existence that constantly force him to die as broken and defeated in the most unheroic way. But, he refuses to succumb to the adverse circumstances of life and finally rises above them through his indomitable courage and invincible will to live. Even if his power is reduced by a monolithic scientific super-structure or a mass society, he is firmly determined to "stay rooted in the wasteland-in the system that attempts to deny his vitality-and concentrate all his energies on battling both himself and the mysterious powers that control him, thereby assuring himself that he is alive." During his relentless struggle to stay alive man in contemporary American fiction emerges as capable of facing up to the demands made on him by a civilization shattered by the two successive World Wars.

After the First World War, the literary sensibility in Europe and America underwent a complete change. Though the change was sudden for the younger people, the older generation had already sensed it simmering beneath the surface in the wake of the scientific and technological advancement during the prewar days. The war hastened the change to its culmination by tearing apart the old fabric of life that was known for its convention, stability, and hopefulness. As a consequence, the postwar period witnessed a new social and intellectual environment of "cavil, criticism, and condemnation" which called for new insights into the old ethics of religion, marriage, love, sex, and literature. Unable to reconcile with cultural and literary principles fostered in full earnestness by their forefathers, the younger people "experimented in utmost seriousness or extravagant frivolity with new modes of action or attitude." They set out in search of new life-styles within or without their native lands to redeem them from their emotional sterility, spiritual disillusionment, and moral debasement caused by the war.

**Contents and Sample Pages**