in Defense 0f the Self: Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision in :The Victim and to Jerusalem and Bock.

a)
The title of the paper implies a cotIDter-argurnent to an almost
common consensus among critics concerning the moral content of Saul
Bellow’s works. The core of Bellow’s morality is agreed to be ”concern
for other human beings,” (Clayton 9) or ”a sense of duty to other men”
(Klug 472). Bellow is one of three American moralists who hope to
”commit themselves” arid their fellow humans ”to die COIru”110n tasks of
the Human City,” (Scott, Jr. 222). This stance is described as a ”defense
of values,” (Scheer-Schazler 3) or, as the subtitle of John Clayton’s
books states, a ”defense of man.” These critical statements flli1 parallel to
various statements by the author himself, who states that ” the aim of art
is the expression of virtue,” and accordingly argues for ”a fiction that
achieves valuable didactic aims” (Morahg 103).
The scope of Bellow’s morality according to established critical
opinion has room for all human beings. However, an examination of The
Victim (1947) against the background of To Jerusalem and Back (1976)
proves. the scope of this morality too narrow to claim universal appeal.
The two works under study belong to two different literary forms; the
novel and the travel book, with about thirty years between them. This
points at the constancy and the depth of Bellow’s belief in the moral
views implied in the novel and stated in the travel book.
The main theme of both books is Jewish sense of persecution or anti-
Semitism. Saul Bellow is so captivated by this theme that he fails in
making the persecution of the Jew, Leventhal and the Israeli, into the
persecution of all men Leventhal does not represent any body but the
Jew. Allbee, the gentile with the absurd charge in The Victim (V), is
recrea far more monstrously in To Jerusalem and Back (FJB) in the
Arab. The ends of the two books, which are almost
reach no hope mmunion or integration into ’ a larger
e morality fictionally in The Victim and more
in To Jerusalem and Back is there to justify a status quo, to
the minds of the Leventhals, not to integrate them into the
’common city of Man’.
Within an arg t that sees The Victim a journey from
reparation, Porter, Clayton, Cohen, Scheer-Schazler and others