How to Analyze Bellow / How Writers Can Learn from Bellow

Alana writes that Bellow "writes about Bellow as if he knows him personally"; check out her remarks here. Bellow's confidential, intimate tone makes his fiction compelling and vivid in spite of his intellectual leanings. He strikes a perfect balance between the tough Chicago street kid and the University of Chicago professor he eventually became. How does he pull off this miracle, since most people who are wise about writing will tell you to pick a tone and stick with it. Alisha notes that Bellow uses the concise parataxis and asyndeton to reinforce Woody's simple, strong, straightforward, and laconic demeanor. That's interesting, because it shows that Bellow uses less formal and more conversational rhetorical techniques - such as asyndeton - to communicate Woody's personality, while the language often reflects Bellow's presence. The two are so seamlessly connected that we don't notice much distinction between the narrator and character. This flexibility gives Bellow his rich and convincing narrative voice.

If it were Morris telling his own story, Asha notes, we might resist him as a character more fully. After all, he's a bit of a scoundrel. But Bellow tells Morris's story through Woody - and through the narrator's unmistakable voice who mocks the mother as "the Empress of India." This leads us to have more sympathy for an unlikable character; in fact, this sympathy for the colorful rogue drives the story.

You might say everything in the story is symbolic, not just the obvious and unapologetic symbol of the silver dish. For Sara G. the story "explores a sense conflict thematically and stylistically. As the protagonist, Woody, struggles psychologically and as a member of society, the structure of the text demonstrates similar patterns." It is not just that the story tells a personal tale that enacts social conflicts (poor vs. rich; respectability vs. libertinism; Christian doctrine vs. Jewish ritual). The different voice in the story itself are the voices of different parts of society: the intellectual, the neighborhood people. And the structure moves from the universal (death) to the personal (mourning). As Lindsey notes, the opening passage directly addresses the contemporary reader as "you," using a paratactic rant to evoke the chaos of the age in which this New Yorker reader is living (late 1970s). Throughout, and throughout his writing, Bellow uses asyndetic parataxis to build intensity and to evoke the Yiddish-derived rhythms of impassioned speech. Authors like Philip Roth have followed in his footsteps, but it takes some literary chops to pull it off.

So, what can we learn from Bellow? See Knox's post for an analysis of the story structure and Bellow's way of making a particular character universal. Berlice admires Bellow's poetic use of alliteration. Erin gives us a very useful analysis of Bellow's paragraph design and diction - check it out. Ben cannily notes Bellow's evocative use of repetition and cyclical design of sentences.

In short, Bellow is not afraid to exploit all the resources of sentence types, voice, point of view, and sonic techniques. I recommend the novels Herzog, Humboldt's Gift, or Mr. Sammler's Planet. Bellow undoes all the stereotypes about American writers as merely "spontaneous."