Alienation of Joseph in Bellow's Dangling Man: A Marxist Reading

Abstract

The alienated labor brings pain and sufferings in the life of human beings. It establishes alien and hostile relations between workers and their own product, activity, species-beings, self and non-producers. And people become isolated, fragmented, mystified, poor, physically exhausted, and mentally debased. Saul Bellow's Dangling Man textualizes the alienation of human beings through his protagonist Joseph. He represents the wholesociety since his existence is possible only in social interactions. Besides, Bellow presents his protagonist's individual protest against the established capitalistic social and moral values. Through it he shows a need of the revolution against capitalism to emancipate human beings from alienated labor.