الفهرس 
The Concepts of Identity and the Social SelfOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
This thesis attempts a fresh look at exploring the troubled relationship between the ‘true self’ and the ‘social self’ in the American society. The question of self versus society is repeatedly fictionalized in the narrative world of the Jewish-American novelist, Saul Bellow (1915-2005). Bellow is quite aware of the individual’s conflict between his true self and social self. Truly, Bellow’s individual immigrant experience as a Jew living in an American community is one essential factor that affects him in dealing with the subjects of his fiction and in portraying the struggle of his protagonists. Often Bellow’s characters are Jewish-American whose identities are shaped within the American culture. Hence, the subject of my study is the emergence of the self, not the Jewish self in particular. Bellow has been drawn to the suffering, the alienated, the paranoid, and the divided heroes regardless of ethnicity and religion.
This study purports to explore the conditions of the emergence of the social self in two of Bellow’s most famous novels: Seize the Day (1956) and The Victim (1947). In these two novels, Bellow depicts the impact of the surrounding social circumstances on the protagonist’s self-perception. Most Bellow’s protagonists, especially in these two works, suffer from alienation. They are always amid struggle in the surrounding American society.
Method of Research
This study applies an interdisciplinary approach that combines a literary and a socio-psychological examination of Bellow’s two novels; Seize The Day (1956) and The Victim (1947). I attempt to study Bellow’s protagonists’ identities, in both novels, in their psychological and social manifestations. I use the findings of prominent figures of sociology and psychology, Robert Dalton, Erich Fromm, Heinz Kohut, R.D Laing and George Mead in dealing with the texts under study to investigate the conflict between self and outer world in Bellow’s protagonists.