Fictionalization of history in Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet

Abstract

This research analyses Saul Bellow's novel Mr. Sammler's Planet in order to show how history is discursive and constructed phenomenon. For this, Michel Foucault's truth, knowledge and power; Stephen Greenblatt's notion of cultural poetics; Louis A. Montrose's view of textualization of history are used as methodology of analysis. It probes into the unreliable character Mr. Sammler, an aged one-eyed Polish Jew now living in New York with his daughter. He is not an astronomer by profession but by a philosophical state of mind. With his one good eye, he peers into history through the telescope, explores the major historical incidents like Vietnam War and holocaust of WWII. Having escaped death in a concentration camp during World War II, Sammler is disillusioned, even horrified by the violence around him. Sammler cannot express the truth of history. He just interprets the events. His all experience of life becomes uncertain because of cultural interpretation of events. So the entire novel renders history as a fiction.