Book Report on "Looking for Mr. Green"

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Bro. George English IV 22 January 2007 Bellow’s Looking for Mr. Green as a Quest Tale Bellow is a master of narrative voice and perspective. He is an outstanding stylist who can move with ease from formal rhetoric to the language of the street. Saul Bellow's works are considered conventional and old-fashioned, as if the author was trying to revive the nineteenth century European novel. His characters are seen as vehicles for his philosophical opportunities to display his intellectuality. Saul Bellow’s works are very hero-centered, which is unusual in modern fiction (Cronin 87). In many of Saul Bellow’s novels the narratives follow his characters closely, interpreting the world through their perceptions. However, the short-story Looking for Mr. Green defies this pattern. The story included here, Looking for Mr. Green, provides a good introduction to Saul Bellow's fiction, particularly in its concern for the experience of contemporary man in search of his own identity. The story is not named after the apparent hero of the story, George Grebe, but after the mysterious crippled man, Tulliver Green. Green becomes the narrative’s focus. Additionally, Bellow’s style of writing much longer works is, in Looking for Mr. Green, replaced with a more narrative, linear structure. The quest of the story’s hero identifies, even through the title, the hero himself (Bradbury 56). Looking for Mr. Green comes to the following conclusions about life: it is a search, on the one hand, for intellectual order; on the other hand, it is a willingness to take life as it is. Grebe’s search for Mr. Green, and his commitment to it as a quest, reflects his rejection of the uncontrollable narrow-mindedness of the “Negro district”. This turmoil, enigmatic and unsolvable, is “life as it is”. Grebe, throughout the story, attempts to bend this chaotic environment to help him in his
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