SOURCE: Corner, Martin. “The Novel and Public Truth: Saul Bellow's The Dean's December.” Studies in American Fiction 28, no. 1 (spring 2000): 113-28.

In the following essay, Corner traces Bellow's progression from examining “individual consciousness to public truth” in The Dean's December.

Can the novel, at the end of the twentieth century, still speak public truth? This is a question that has haunted Saul Bellow's fiction since Joseph, in Dangling Man, could find no connection between his private experience and the historic realities of war. But it is more than an issue for a single writer. The conscious problem of our culture since Bellow's first fiction appeared in the 1940s has been the survival of the individual before the dominating public realities of political and economic power, and this is a problem that Bellow, in his first novel, forcefully identified. For the novel as a literary form, however, the problem has...