Virginia Woolf is a famous writer, but here the title has nothing to do with the writer. Her name is used because “woolf” is similar to “wolf” in sound.
Chapter 20
The Post-War Scene
Background:
1. The post-war prosperity produced a sense of optimism, but it soon was spoiled by the “Cold War” between powers.
2. The life of the fifties was poisoned at the root by the anti-communist hysteria of McCarthyism.
3. The life of the sixties enriched by the Civil Rights Movement. But at the same time, the Vietnam War had all the time weighed on the consciousness of the people. Everything seemed to be subjected to a prevailing skepticism.
4. New advances in science and technology, while giving people an increasing sense of power, have deprived life of its mysteries and continued to dehumanize man.
So the post-war period is a period during which the universe is out of joint, the world is a crazy, random, chaotic and tragic place. Man’s existence is absurd; people become grotesque, writers become more and more nihilistic.
                  Novel
               Saul Bellow (索.贝娄)
1. the best representative writer after World War II.
2. Jewish American writer, scholar writer, like a philosopher.
3. Nobel Prize winner in 1976.
4. His strength lies in his faith in man and man’s ability to offer a “spiritual resistance to the force of our time”. His novels usually end on an affirmative note. It is not always a happy ending, but it is an ending which calls for hope more than despair.
Subject matter: He wrote about the spiritual conflicts of the intellectuals, and about big city life. Most of his heroes are Jewish intellectuals or writers.
Characters: ordinary, troubled in life, burdened by the pressure of life, facing violence and victimization, trying to discover the queerness of existence and overcome it.
Famous novels: Dangling Man (晃来晃去的人) It is about a young man waiting for recruit. He gives up his job, and is supported by his wife. Dangling here and there without doing anything, he feels even more depressed. With time goes on, the spirit and soul of the protagonist are exposed to the readers. He feels that he does not live in a spacious world, but is cooped up in a prison without tomorrow, only the past remains. (Many of Saul Bellow’s protagonists are the same kind. They dangle here and there, attempting to seek their identity or the nature of themselves.
The Adventures of Augie March(p.413.) a novel told from first personal viewpoint. It follows Augie from his childhood and youth in Chicago, to Mexico and then to his manhood in Paris. Augie is an orphan of Jewish born in a Chicago slum. From his boyhood, there have been existed forces trying to manipulate him, and he tries to get out of it. He endeavors to discover his own identity and define it in his own term. He wants too become what he would like himself to be, though his problem has always been that he does not know exactly what it is that he would like to be. So he is seen running away all the time. The world does not allow him to live as he pleases, he never finds the right thing to do. He keeps dreaming: marrying a lovely wife and doing some farming and beekeeping on a “private green place”. But this pastoral ideal never comes true. Then he starts wondering whether he is “a man of hope or foolishness”. Indeed he is both: he is foolish because he is hopeful. So modern civilization has made it impossible to keep one’s individual identity.
Henderson, the Rain King.(雨王汉德逊). The protagonist, not Jewish, a millionaire in his fifties, not satisfied with his rich material life, goes to an imagined African land to search for spiritual power and meaning of life, and becomes rain maker and heir to a throne. In the end, realizing that to do something for the society is the real pleasure of life, he returns to America to study medicine. The novel is an affirmative one to life and individuality in the form of Utopia.
Herzog (赫索格) concerning spiritual crisis of intellectuals. Herzog, a Jewish professor of physics has been concerned about the development of man and his civilization. He is ambitious enough to plan a big book on social progress. However, he finds it impossible to carry out his project because life has somehow gone wrong. His family life is frustrating. His first marriage is not a happy one, so he gets divorced. But he then finds that his best friend commits adultery with his second wife. Furthermore, unemployment, social unrest, political hysteria, industrial pollution, poverty, racial conflicts, crime, violence…all these trouble his sanity and makes him eccentric. He begins to write to both the living and the dead to relieve himself of the suffering.
The Victim (受害者)
Seize the Day (只争朝夕)
Mr.Samuler’s Plannet( …先生的行星)

Norman Mailer (梅勒)
Famous novels:
The Naked and the Dead (裸者与死者)
The Armies of the Night (夜间军队)
The Naked and the Dead (裸者与死者): The first and the best novel of his. It was written according to his experience as a soldier. It tells the story of 14-man platoon that lands on the barren beach of Anopopei, a small Japanese-held island in the South Pacific. The platoon is part of a 6,000-man-force to seize control of the island and prepare the way for a larger American move into the Philippines. Midway, Private Wilson is shot in the belly. Four attempt to carry him to the safety, but two gives up in exhaustion. The other two take him over muddy hills, across baked fields and through the suffocating jungle, but he eventually dies. The patrol goes forward slowly, and another two die on the way to the summit. Just as they are about to attain the summit, a nest of hornets explodes upon them, and they fall down the slope.
With the publication of the novel, Mailer is thought as one of the American naturalist writers. In the naturalistic world, the individual is prey to certain forces over which he has no control. These forces are biological, social or geographical. The universe of The Naked and the Dead is a cold, indifferent cosmos, man labors only to die, and God takes no interest in his welfare.

               J.D Salinger (塞琳杰)
The Catcher in the Rye (麦田里的守望者) he best English novel coming out of World War II. It relates the painful story of a high school boy growing up in the world of decadent New York. The novel depicts an adolescent’s disgust and despair at the fallen state of that adult world around him. It is a world of jerks and perverts (sexual behavior is considered abnormal), a salient of which is its decadence.
Young Holden Caufield is expelled from school because of poor academic records. Afraid to meet his parents, he checks himself into a hotel, but finds that it is full of prostitutes and homosexuals. He becomes, very soon, aware of the fact that the world of adults is a false one, and that he is surrounded by Jerks of all kinds. He quarrels with one of them who tries to cheat him out of his pocket, and is beaten up. The second day moves on slowly, sad and weary. A meeting with a friend ends with another quarrel. He gets drunk and feels lonesome and depressed. Night falls, he sneaks back home to see his sister. His parent come back home, so he creeps out of home, and goes to his former teacher, only to find that the man is a homosexual. He escapes hastily from the teacher’s home. Now he is thinking of going west and spending the rest of his life there. He goes to say goodbye to his sister. But she insists on going with him. This unexpected act of love jostles him out of his dream and his nightmarish three-day adventure in New York. He goes home, falls ill, and recovers in a mental home. It is there that he recounts his sad story of growing up in The Catcher in the rye.