寻找格林先生 人生态度分析.docVIP

The Analysis of Different Life Attitudes during the Great Depression in Looking for Mr. Green Dong Haoyue Abstract: Looking for Mr. Green is one of Saul Bellow’s best short stories with the Great Depression as the setting. The story is mainly about the efforts of George Grebe to deliver relief checks to the poor disabled people who live in the Southern Chicago. This paper focuses on the analysis of different life attitudes in the process of looking for Mr. Green, which includes the attitudes of marginalized intellectual class, the official class, and the poor black people. From the analysis, we can see the sharp contrast among the attitudes of different classes under the superficial turbulence, and meanwhile grasp the profound influence and literature status of Saul Bellow’s works. Keys words: Looking for Mr. Green; life attitude; Great Depression 1 Introduction Saul Bellow (1915-2005), born in Quebec, is a famous American writer of Jewish origin. Attaining prominence in the post-war era, Saul Bellow is “one of the most widely read and intellectually eclectic novelists of the Jewish American School” (Sandy, 2008:57). He was the first novelist to win the National Book Award three times. His career reached its exciting climax in 1976 when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Then he has become, in the words of Leslie Fiedler, “the emerging heir to the Hemingway-Faulkner prestige”(常耀信, 2008:430). His works are always about the delusive nature of modern civilization and the ability of human beings to overcome difficulties and achieve greatness or at least awareness. Looking for Mr. Green is a short story collected in Mosby’s Memories and Other Stories. In this short story, Saul Bellow describes different people’s life attitudes during the Great Depression. The Great Depression was a worldwide economic recession starting in 1929 and ending at different times in the 1930s or early 1940s. It was the largest and most serious econo