Starting with the premise that Saul Bellow’s belongingness to Judaism manifests itself as a cultural heritage of a set of values, this paper ventures to define a pattern according to which the American and the Jewish cultural horizons articulate within the author’s work. After establishing the impacts of each of the two cultural spheres on the bellovian writing, this analysis shows the disruptive relationship they entertain. The American influence is identified as having an incidence on the novelistic “form”, while the Jewish aspect is proved to have a bear on the narratives’ “content”. The synchronism of the two cultures, given by the fact that Bellow’s hero belongs simultaneously to both, is undermined by the conflicting principles defining them. Thus, the values inherited from Jewish tradition will appear anachronous with the prevailing models of the American present. This dialectics is understood as a subtle mechanism of the bellovian literary creation.
