By general critical agreement,Saul Bellow is the strongest American novelist of his generation.He is a writer of high modern absurdities,who has both expressed and reacted against much that is at work in this new mood.His fiction is a fiction of struggle,formal and philosophical,and has taken a variety of forms.But it is not hard to see behind it a moral,intellectual and metaphysical undertaking of great and classic power.To some,his work has come to look both formally and philosophically conservative;the problem is to see what it is seeks to conserve,and to grasp the scale of the undertaking,for there can be no doubt that his novels are battlegrounds of contemporary intellectual disposition,encounters with both our potential despair and out possibility.Bellows heroes-usually intellectuals,often writers,and men concerned to face constant victimization and defeat.Generally speaking,they are all the dangling men.Joseph is dangling between commitments and value systems.Asa Leventhal appears unaware of any fundamental disharmony in his universe.Augie March casts adrift in life and gradually porceeding toward a defined system of values.Tommy Wilhelm seems to have wandered up almost every dead end,which the world has to offer.henderson who suffers none of the outward victimization of Bellows earlier heroes,being his first non-Jewish central figure,is involved in soul-searching.Herzog is a wanderer in the mind as well as the heart-the picaroon flat on his back.Sammler is someone between the human and not-human states,between content and emptiness,between full and void,meaning and not-meaning,between this world and no world.Charlie Citrine is another Bellows bumbling seekers after truth.Albert Corde,who,like Sammler and Citrine,knows his own complicity,is in some ways shamed by his own self-questioning,yet who still has some need to encounter his own fundamental human nature,to discover the place of the true soul which feels.They,despite the hostility of an absurd environment,establish a new and viable basis for human dignity,and eventually they come to terms with reality.This thesis moves around this theme by the analysis of the protagonists,such as Joseph,Asa Leventhal,Augie March,Tommy Wilhelm,Henderson,Herzog,Sammler,Charlie Citrine and Albert Corde.