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2013

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#	Year	Text	Linked Data
1	1956	Bellow, Saul. Seize the day ; with three short stories and a one-act play. (New York, N.Y. : Viking Press, 1956). Hong Wu : The acceptance of existentialism is present in Saul Bellow's characterization of his protagonists in The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Dangling Man (1944), The Victims (1964) and Seize the Day (1956), nevertheless it will elicit objection from other commentators and even Bellow himself to simply label him as an existentialist writer by ignoring the profundity and plurality of Saul Bellow. His speculative ideas conveyed in all the novels inevitably take on the print of currently popular existentialism. Seize the Day possibly best represents his understanding of life, human nature, and individuality from the perspective of existentialism. For a Jew, [Wilhelm] the faith in God and the belief in Judaism are of tremendous significance for his orientation in life and the sense of belonging in a society. Judaism was welded together homeless Jews all over the world, has provided courage and comfort for Jews to undergo numerous traumatic afflictions in thousands of years. Bellow reveals a self complying with Sartre's definition and uses Sartre's idea of existence to secure a place for Wilhelm's self. He also wants to depict a man of bitterness in this story. The text itself is sodden with misery, which permeates between lines. Wilhelm's anguish goes along with his forlornness, stems from his past, and claims it self in his free choice, comforts a lost self and culminates in the futility of seeking a father. In Seize the Day, Saul Bellow sketches an alienated person, Wilhelm, and exposes to us how a tortured soul grapples with his humiliating past itching in a youth belief in individual freedom, how a crippled son oscillates between two fathers, a real one and a substitute one, how an illusioned American Jew wrestles with money, yet at the brim of destruction simply survives when all his sobs, regrets, despair, and anguish melt in tears. Problems remain there, no matter whether soluble or insoluble, because life is like that—being bristling with problems at any time and any place. There is no easy and permanent resolution to life's problems which are intrinsically complicated and illogical, and further compounded by the absurdity and chaos of the modern world. Seize the Day fully illustrates the recurrent practice of Saul Bellow in his literary creation—he does not avoid conditions of alienation and despair; but he insists that through them the power of the imagination should reveal the greatness of man and that we are not gods, not beasts, but savages of somewhat damaged but not extinguished nobility. It is a belief of optimism in pessimism. After that doom day, Wilhelm will continue making free choices and defining himself by his series of acts. It is hinted that he will move out of New York to live in Roxbury, like Herzog's choice to live in the countryside, and will make up with Olive in the future. This kind of optimism in pessimism is true with Sartre. Being and Nothingness is devoted to explicating this point—man is not an entity, but an awareness, so he is destined to go outward, destined to make free choices of their action, thus existence is meaningful. Seize the Day metaphorically and rhetorically paraphrases what Sartre presents in esoteric philosophy about such propositions as anguish, despair, freedom, individual choice, self, and existence. Sartre says that existentialism has an optimistic toughness and it isn't trying to plunge man into despair at all, whereas it is a philosophy that makes life possible. Sartre and Saul Bellow both have defended man's dignity and found a way for people to endure and prevail in a special historical period. Their contribution for human beings' understanding of life and self has gained the recognition and the world by the Nobel Prize.	Person: Bellow, Saul