



































Bellow, Kierkegaard, and American Estheticism


[Expositions 6.1 (2012) 68–80]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

Bellow, Kierkegaard, and American Estheticism 

JULIANNE ROMANELLO 

Baylor University and Tulsa Community College 

 

 

A key theme of Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet is humanity’s quest for self-

understanding. Several approaches to that quest circulate in the dramatic world that Bellow 

crafts. Among the most prominent approaches are those guided by theories purporting to have 

comprehensive explanatory power – physics, psychoanalysis, and Marxist economics, for 

example – and popular “culture,” which, as a whole, seems to celebrate arbitrariness and the 

ability to defy explanation. Both approaches, the “scientific” and the “artistic,” respectively are 

distinctively modern in the sense that they abdicate on the question of whether or not human 

beings are characterized by having a proper end, or telos, let alone the question of what such an 

end might be. In Bellow’s modern America, the human quest for self-understanding is either 

reduced to an intellectual exercise in description (that is often materialistic) or rendered obsolete 

by an emphasis on complete self-fashioning. In the case of the former, understanding seems to 

imply a deterministic destruction of the self; in the latter, radical freedom preserves individuality 

at the price of understanding. 

In this article, I examine Bellow’s dramatic critique of these approaches to the quest for self- 

understanding and his portrayal of an alternative existential approach that is more humane even 

as it is grounded in faith and accepts mystery as a permanent feature of the human condition. 

Bellow’s existentialism follows Kierkegaard, whose concepts I use in my examination because 

Sammler refers to them explicitly, in suggesting that the defining task of human life was to 

become a “true” or “authentic” self: a self that is passionately oriented toward and formed in 

light of an encounter with the source of existence and truth. This task often leads individuals 

through the three “spheres” of life Kierkegaard described: the ethical, the esthetic, and the 

religious. Bellow’s novel depicts characters moving through these spheres and suggests that 

while individuals who seriously embark on the quest for authentic selfhood cannot achieve 

perfection, they may gain self-understanding and find themselves prepared to assess and to 

confront the realities of finite or temporal existence in a way that avoids the pitfalls of the 

scientific and artistic approaches. For Bellow, self-understanding emerges as requiring a certain 

ethical-religious outlook consisting in a genuine concern for others that is grounded in openness 

to divine being and the obligations that knowledge of the divine imposes on human passion, 

action, and thought.  

 

Kierkegaard’s Three Spheres 

 

Before discussing Bellow’s employment of Kierkegaard’s concepts, it will be helpful to mention 

some key features of Kierkegaard’s thought and authorship. First, many of his writings are 



69  Romanello 

 

 

 

penned pseudonymously. Kierkegaard wanted to distance himself from the views presented by 

his pseudonyms for several reasons, including to avoid and to incriminate what he took to be 

Hegel’s prideful location of the source of philosophic truth in his own mind. More importantly, 

Kierkegaard thought that the endeavor to become an authentic self required individuals to 

appropriate the objective truth subjectively, that is, in a manner that goes beyond intellectual 

mastery of propositions toward a life-determinative passion for moral and intellectual 

knowledge. The indirect teaching might induce individuals to become active participants in the 

process of discovering and realizing their natural calling and purpose. 

In The Sickness unto Death, the pseudonym Anti-Climacus begins by stating that “a human 

being is spirit,” and then asking, “But what is spirit?”
1
 In a formulation that is more lucid than it 

first appears, Anti-Climacus goes on to state: 

 

Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or 

is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the 

relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the 

finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. 

[…] Such a relation that relates itself to itself, a self, must either have established itself 

or have been established by another.
2
 

 

If human beings are “established by another” – which Kierkegaard (and Mr. Sammler) believed 

to be the case – another relation, viz. to the “establisher” or creator, enters into the constitution of 

the self: a relation that “relates itself to that which established the entire relation” (13).
3
 

Put simply, Kierkegaard thought that a self (or soul) is an entity that relates to God. The 

relation between the self and God is a necessary one and the fulfillment of man’s essential 

humanity depends upon that relation being constituted properly. From the perspective of man 

qua man, the self has both an eternal and a temporal orientation that are in tension with each 

other. Man participates in and longs for eternal, infinite being as the source of his being, order, 

and purpose. The universal yearning for fulfillment through communion with God testifies to the 

common condition of humanity.
4
 But because the self finds its existence in the finite realm, it 

also suffers a natural concern for the concrete particulars of spatio-temporal existence, or the 

features that make an individual’s life unique. The relational tension between these two longings 

constitutes one of the partners of the relation that exists with the self considered as a whole. 

Concern for the particulars of finite, spatio-temporal existence is not of itself detrimental to a 

proper order of the self because genuine communion with God requires the realization that there 

is an infinite difference between human being and divine being. Grasping the particularities of 

his existence better equips the individual to perceive the ontological gulf between human and 

divine being. What does impede authentic selfhood is when an individual’s concern for the 

particulars of temporal existence becomes radical and overshadows his concern for communion 

with God. Focusing on the immanent features of existence more than the transcendent ones, 

compromises the balance of relations that is crucial to living well.  



Bellow, Kierkegaard, and American Estheticism  70 

 

  

Another way an individual may become unbalanced is by accepting conventional standards of 

order as the necessary and sufficient conditions for living well. Although the focus on 

community standards represents a shift toward something beyond the particular self, an 

individual’s orientation is still aimed at immanent reality rather than the genuine source of order 

that is eternal and transcendent. Kierkegaard thought these immanent, communal standards of 

order, or “universals,” often distract individuals from their existential task just as much as radical 

individualism does.
5
 Often individuals dispassionately presume that the “universals” are fully 

rational and, consequently, that living well means acting according to society’s conception of the 

ethical.  

  

The Esthetic Life 

 

The esthetic life is portrayed in Either/Or I in the papers of a young man, known simply as “A.” 

The esthetic life aims at restoring to life the immediacy and passion which all but evaporate 

under the sterile rationality of Hegelian esthetics and social theory.
6
 While it presents a critique 

of Hegelianism that is basically coherent, the esthetic life presented in Either/Or I lacks 

substantive internal consistency. It is a life driven by revolt against a dominant way of thinking 

(the “universals”) and is essentially reactionary. Esthetes have no overarching passion that 

unifies life; they live for the moment, for possibilities, and for an “interesting” succession of 

sensations. They crave distinction and diverse experiences in order to preclude others from 

arriving at explanations of their lives. In their reaction against rationalism, esthetes try to retain 

the maximum level of freedom by refusing either to make moral commitments or to accept 

responsibility for the constitution of their personality.  

Esthetes are characterized by their immediacy or reflectiveness: immediate esthetes are driven 

to act by carnal and spiritual passion, not thought; reflective esthetes try to create an “artistic” or 

unique life experience by using thought to activate and deactivate various passionate responses. 

The reflective esthete develops his powers of recollecting and forgetting, for these help him to 

manipulate his experiences infinitely, to create new and interesting experiences of old 

experiences, or to “play shuttlecock with all existence.”
7
 Whereas the immediate esthete enjoys 

the excitement of the opera in which he is carried away by the music, the reflective esthete 

prefers ancient tragedy, in which there seems no way to pinpoint accurately the responsibility for 

the dramatic conflict. 

 

The Ethical Life 

 

In Either/Or II, Judge William presents an ethical critique of the esthetic life that demonstrates 

the aimlessness of the esthete’s passion. The Judge argues that selfhood requires coherent 

passions anchored in some guiding principle. The ethical life does not rehabilitate Hegelian 

social ethics; rather, it demands passionately choosing to take responsibility for the development 

of one’s self. The Judge argues that A’s refusal to take responsibility for fashioning his life is 



71  Romanello 

 

 

 

still a choice to live a certain way; through such “choices,” selves inevitably acquire a certain 

momentum or habit. Therefore, the Judge tries to shake A from his existential paralysis, arguing 

that passion, distinction, and individuality are not obliterated by decisions that happen to be in 

line with accepted social conventions; instead, they are intensified by the formation of one’s 

emotions and personality around a consistent set of commitments. In the Judge’s presentation, 

the ethical man observes socially-accepted religious practices and has a general idea that human 

beings need to be devoted to God.
8
 

Again, Kierkegaard explores both positive and negative aspects of the ethical life. The 

positive side is the infusion of passion into choices that uphold social order rather than 

compromising it by radical individuality. The ethical individual takes seriously his duties to 

others which derive from the roles (such as husband, father, employee, citizen, etc.) he has 

chosen to assume and to execute passionately. The negative side is that his concern for fulfilling 

such duties can obscure the conflicts that inevitably arise between the various roles he holds and 

the limitations spatio-temporal existence places on human agency. In Either/Or II, the ethical 

man seems to be unaware of the magnitude of such conflicts at times presuming that “ought” 

really does imply “can.” In this way, the ethical man often overlooks the particular features of 

existence which must factor into any genuinely good moral choice. 

 

The Religious Life 

 

In Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio explores the religious life: the life of faith in which 

the individual self relates to God properly because his passion is correctly ordered with regard to 

both its temporal and eternal objects. Silentio claims not to understand personally the religious 

life. He nevertheless recognizes the biblical Abraham as an exemplar of the faith and endeavors 

to understand how Abraham’s faith manifests itself in the particulars of his life. Silentio is 

concerned especially with how Abraham’s willingness to follow God’s command to sacrifice his 

son demonstrates that faith, whatever it may be, simply cannot be reducible to an ethical decision 

because in no ethical system would a father’s decision to murder his son be permitted.  

In particular, Silentio is baffled that Abraham could, upon being commanded by God not to 

continue with the sacrifice of Isaac, resume the relationship with Isaac that preceded his decision 

to follow the divine command to kill. Silentio cannot fathom how Abraham could “receive Isaac 

back,” concluding that it follows from the absurdity that accompanies faith. Silentio thinks it 

more comprehensible that Abraham would find himself unable to participate fully in one’s 

concrete, temporal existence because of his concentrated focus on eternal being. Being unable to 

identify with Abraham, whom he calls “the knight of faith,” Silentio finds his analysis of 

Abraham insufficient to unravel the mystery he witnesses: how a single individual before God 

can cope with both the temporal and eternal orientations of his soul. Silentio remains the “knight 

of infinite resignation,” the individual who is prepared to give up and cannot conceive of 

regaining that which wholly constitutes his temporal identity in the hopes of communing with the 

eternal.   



Bellow, Kierkegaard, and American Estheticism  72 

 

  

Kierkegaard in Bellow 

 

Bellow draws on Kierkegaard’s spheres of existence for the novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Not 

only does he explicitly mention Kierkegaard, the esthetic standard, the knight of infinite 

resignation, and the knight of faith, but also his characters exhibit the key qualities of each of the 

spheres. In the messy world of modern America, the characters often oscillate among the 

spheres. But generally speaking, most of them live, so Sammler thinks, the esthetic life. 

Moreover, society as a whole seems esthetic, having lost its sense of self, its dignity, and its 

sense of duty. Brief sketches of Walter Bruch and Angela Gruner will show Sammler’s sense 

that in modern America, the spirit and self are diseased, suffering under the malady of 

infatuation with the finite, particular features of human existence.  

Walter Bruch is an acquaintance of Sammler who is introduced just as Sammler has been 

thinking about Dr. Lal’s conception of moon-life and the incident on the Riverside bus. For 

Sammler, both Lal’s technical plan of escape and the pickpocket’s demonstration of carnal force 

exhibit the deification of Nature. “Make Nature your God, elevate creatureliness, and you can 

count on gross results,” Sammler thinks.
9
 At that moment, Walter arrives at Sammler’s 

apartment in order to confess one of his dark, carnal secrets: his obsession with the climax-

inducing stimulus of heavy, dark, Puerto Rican arms. This disclosure is not an isolated incident: 

Walter has confessed to playing with children’s toys, sending rude letters to other musicians, and 

acting the corpse at mock-funerals.  

Like the esthete, Walter relishes sharing these indicators of his unique pathology. He acts as if 

the arm obsession is a burden and revels in the particularity it bestows upon him. Sammler 

reassures Walter’s that his fetish is common nowadays, but then realizes the effect his 

reassurance will have: “Walter, when his crying stopped, would be hurt by the Krafft-Ebing 

reference, by the assertion that his deviation was not too unusual. Nothing seemed to hurt quite 

so much as being ravaged by a vice that was not a top vice” (50). Walter exhibits, in Sammler’s 

mind, the esthetic characteristics of seeking particularity in perverse physical deeds, which are 

assumed to be the overt symptoms of a deeper, spiritual disease that is meted out by fate. For the 

esthete, acting according to “nature” means resigning to and reveling in the oddities that one 

cannot help but exhibit – oddities, which are not, as the drama of the novel shows, actually 

unique. 

Elya Gruner’s daughter Angela also lives esthetically according to Sammler. She engages in 

taboo sexual activities and enjoys endlessly rehashing the original experiences. She discloses her 

secrets in psychoanalytic sessions and then again to Sammler, omitting not even the most 

intimate detail. Angela is “educated” and “cultured”; an alumna of Sarah Lawrence College, she 

attends the opera, visits museums, and supports whichever causes are in vogue at the time 

(defense funds for young black men accused of rape, for example). Both Walter and Angela try 

to distance themselves from the ordinary majority, but wind up engaging only in a snobbier, 

more self-deluded bourgeois conformism.  



73  Romanello 

 

 

 

Angela and Walter are simultaneously obsessed with existentialism and psychoanalysis: the 

former an assertion of radical freedom and individuality (the “artistic” viewpoint), the latter a 

deterministic reduction of everything to material forces (the “scientific” viewpoint). In these two 

trends, the contradicting forces of freedom and necessity, of particularity and universality, wed in 

the paradoxical manner that esthetes relish. This also accounts for Walter’s and Angela’s 

fixations on physical as well as spiritual abnormalities. The sexual activities mimic the 

immediate esthete’s carnal passions; the endless confessions (which “communicate chaos”) and 

explanations mimic the reflective esthete’s love of interesting psychic twists and turns. These 

esthetes live in the moment for a time and then move into the role of observer trying time and 

again to create an interesting and unique self for themselves. Their selves lack coherence. 

Sammler thinks Walter and Angela are accurate reflections of the American psyche. At one 

point he reflects: 

 

What one sees on Broadway while bound for the bus. All human types reproduced, the 

barbarian, redskin, or Fiji, the dandy, the buffalo hunter, the desperado, the queer, the 

sexual fantasist, the squaw; bluestocking, princess, poet, painter, prospector, 

troubadour, guerrilla, Che Guevara, the new Thomas à Becket. Not imitated are the 

businessman, the soldier, the priest and the square. The standard is aesthetic. (120)  

 

Sammler thinks that the modern world has slid into the spiritual despair of estheticism. In this 

milieu, Sammler sees himself as “not quite human” and largely alienated from those around him. 

In general, modern individuals remind Sammler of: 

 

Kierkegaard’s comical account of people traveling around the world to see rivers and 

mountains, new stars, birds of rare plumage, queerly deformed fishes, ridiculous breeds 

of men – tourists abandoning themselves to the bestial stupor which gazes at existence 

and thinks it has seen something […] [People] wished to be what was gaped at. They 

themselves wanted to be the birds of rare plumage, the queerly deformed fishes, the 

ridiculous breeds of men. (50)
10

 

 

Sammler’s critique of the surrounding estheticism seems to place him in the ethical sphere. He 

is concerned about duties, he longs for a return to the order that had made America’s beginnings 

worthy ones, and tries to be devoted to God and family. He tries to “declare for normalcy” (96). 

In a world obsessed with throwing off duty altogether, Sammler takes all the weight of it onto his 

own shoulders. 

 

The Knight of Infinite Resignation 

 

Despite the similarities, Sammler differs from the Judge of Either/Or II, for the latter is 

passionately concerned for temporal affairs.
11

 Sammler, by contrast, “wanted, with God, to be 



Bellow, Kierkegaard, and American Estheticism  74 

 

  

free from the bondage of the ordinary and the finite. A soul released from Nature, from 

impressions, and from everyday life. […] He should be perfectly disinterested” (96). While 

Sammler is deeply nostalgic for older times and their definitive conception of order, he 

concentrates on the metaphorical escape to the moon and its solitude and peace: “Sammler did 

feel somewhat separated from the rest of his species, if not in some fashion severed – severed not 

so much by age as by preoccupations too different and remote, disproportionate on the side of 

the spiritual, Platonic, Augustinian, thirteenth-century” (34).
12

   

Sammler’s experiences with the extent of human cruelty illuminate the deep incoherence of 

the human condition; because human nature tends toward evil, it is not worth trying to redeem. 

Sammler reflects upon when he killed the unarmed German, an act which could be justified in 

the name of self-preservation. Yet Sammler’s immediate response to his deed belied its 

reasonableness. At the moment, killing gave Sammler “pleasure” and “joy”: 

 

His heart felt lined with brilliant, rapturous satin. To kill the man and to kill him without 

pity, for he was dispensed from pity. There was a flash, a blot of fiery white. When he 

shot again it was less to make sure of the man than to try again for that bliss. To drink 

more flames. He would have thanked God for that opportunity. If he had had any God. 

At that time, he did not. For many years, in his own mind, there was no judge but 

himself. (115) 

 

Confronted with his own dark action and passion, Sammler begins to seek the meaning of human 

existence in a transcendent source. Resigning himself from happiness and fulfillment in this 

world, Sammler longs for escape to another world that is free from the temptations of 

viciousness.  

This recalls Kierkegaard’s treatment of the religious life, for post-War Sammler resembles 

Silentio, or the knight of infinite resignation. In trying to comprehend the faith of Abraham, 

Silentio posits several alternate scenarios as foils for understanding how the anxiety wrought by 

the command to sacrifice Isaac must have worked upon Abraham. Silentio’s description of what 

he himself would have done if faced with the command to kill Isaac nicely illuminates 

Sammler’s existential outlook: 

 

The moment I mounted the horse I would have said to myself: “Now all is lost; God 

demands Isaac, I sacrifice him and with him all my joy – yet God is love and continues 

to be that for me, for in temporality God and I cannot converse, we have no language in 

common.” […] I could not make more than the infinite movement in order to find 

myself and once again be in equilibrium. Nor could I have loved Isaac as Abraham 

loved him. That I was determined to make the movement could prove my courage, 

humanly speaking; that I loved him with my whole heart is a precondition without 

which the whole thing becomes a misdeed. But I still did not love as Abraham did […] 

What came easiest for Abraham would have been difficult for me – once again to be 



75  Romanello 

 

 

 

joyful with Isaac! – for whoever has made the infinite movement with all the infinity of 

his soul, of his own accord and on his own responsibility, and cannot do more only 

keeps Isaac with pain.
13

 

 

The knight of infinite resignation gives up that which has given coherence to his entire life, 

and in the case of Sammler, what he has given up is his place in the finite world and his belief in 

the general goodness of humanity. He has given up his previous self – the optimistic, Anglophile 

intellectual who thought that temporal existence could be made to conform to the rationality of a 

philosophic system – and has become, like the esthete, something of a detached observer.  

Sammler’s ethical religiosity (he prays, he longs for the infinite, he tries to live well by 

treating others according to moral standards that are beyond those of culture and society) may be 

an improvement upon the rampant estheticism of his day, but it brings him no closer to true 

friendship, love, or “receiving Isaac back”: “His onetime human, onetime precious, life had been 

burnt away” (185). Thus, Sammler’s criticism of other characters’ inconsistency and lack of 

genuine self-awareness masks his own tendency to treat others with “dignity” without treating 

them as “human.” 

 

Towards Transcendence 

 

Bellow reveals his own thought about what it means to live well through Sammler’s experiences 

with three characters: Margotte, Shula, and Elya. All are united in their genuine concern for 

others, their sense of duty, and willingness to make the best of the absurd situations in which 

they find themselves. Their graciousness is a foil for Sammler’s reticence through which 

Sammler’s reconciliation with God, humanity, and himself begins. 

Through Sammler’s eyes Margotte, Shula, and Elya are sympathetic, yet overly simplistic 

creatures. They seem too unaware of themselves and the world around them for Sammler’s taste: 

Margotte is cheerfully careless and German; Shula is wacky and compulsively devoted to her 

father and the intellectual enterprise; and Elya is overly affectionate, boastful, and concerned 

with superficial appearances. He craves public displays of affection, attempts to be the ideal 

patient, and is obsessed with ancestors. Sammler eventually discovers that each of these 

characters is motivated by a sensitivity to a higher standard of order that guides their thought and 

action about themselves and others. They are, each in their own way, oriented simultaneously 

toward the absolute duties that derive from the existential perception of God and toward the 

particular duties that derive from their situation within temporal existence.  

In contrast to Sammler’s other-worldly detachment, Margotte attends to the mundane things: 

during the chaotic events of the novel, she fixes dinner for the company, makes transportation 

arrangements, and pays attention to small details of concern so that the larger concerns may be 

resolved. “Margotte was prompt to help when difficulties were real. […] Margotte was a good 

soul. No persisting mechanically in her ways when the signal was given. As others did, jumping 

into their routines” (108). Margotte is an example of human freedom, and Bellow shows that she 



Bellow, Kierkegaard, and American Estheticism  76 

 

  

is still capable of love. Despite the loss of her husband (a relationship which appears to have 

been more loving than Sammler’s), she has not given up on life or companionship, and she and 

Dr. Lal look forward to courting. Margotte’s comportment shows that happiness in this world is 

possible and desirable.  

Bellow’s portrayal of Shula functions similarly. Through most of the novel, Shula seems 

merely to be a complication for Sammler. Though he loves her, it seems to be based primarily on 

her role in relation to him rather than any specific characteristics of her personhood; he does not 

understand her. Her antics confuse and burden Sammler, and he thinks that she too represents the 

chaos that animates American society and the failure to heed what is proper or real in life. 

However, Shula proves that her father’s detached, objective views seldom result in a truthful 

evaluation of others. For after Shula actually finds money hidden in Elya’s home (which 

Sammler thought not to exist), she tells Sammler she would like to buy some nicer clothes: “If I 

was dressed at Lord and Taylor, maybe I’d be less of an eccentric type, and I’d have a chance 

with somebody” (257). During this discussion, Sammler finally realizes that Shula is aware of 

herself, that she acts “deliberately,” that “there was a degree of choice” (257). Shula, like 

Margotte, wants to find love and has not given up on the idea that one can be happy in the 

temporal world. This is why Shula broke “ethical” norms by stealing the manuscript. Nutty as 

her plan was, it was marked by a genuine concern for her father: she thought that reading the 

manuscript would inspire him to participate in this world again. Shula shows one striving in the 

world to live, and while “eccentric” she does not exhibit Angela’s or Walter’s self-centered 

estheticism; rather, she is devoted, believes in love, and is able (though perhaps unintentionally) 

to show Sammler that the particulars must oftentimes correct the universals.
14

 

Finally, Bellow uses Elya Gruner to educate Sammler. In some ways Elya resembles 

Kierkegaard’s Judge William: he is deferential to family and traditions, through his life one can 

see that he has conformed to rather than to try to set himself apart from certain societal norms, he 

seems to be the epitome of American success. Born in a “hoodlum neighborhood,” he became 

wealthy through the medical practice and then made a fortune in real-estate and other business 

dealings. He sent his children to the top schools, supports distant relatives financially, and tries to 

be affectionate to everyone. If he has some character flaws – being overly gregarious, proud, 

perhaps having had some corrupt dealings – they are overshadowed in the end by his generosity 

and sincerity.  

Elya is not exactly like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, since we see little devotion to God or 

spirituality in him, but the two share the belief that living well requires “meeting the terms of 

one’s contract with God,” which obliges one to treat others with compassion and dignity (260). 

Elya acts out of a passionate sense of personal responsibility for his own moral goodness and 

exemplifies in practice what Sammler thinks is the substance of the “contract”:  

 

[…] knowing that present arrangements were not, sub specie aeternitatis, the truth, but 

that one should be satisfied with such truth as one could get by approximation. Trying 

to live with a civil heart. With disinterested charity. With a sense of the mystic potency 



77  Romanello 

 

 

 

of humankind. With an inclination to believe in archetypes of goodness. A desire for 

virtue was no accident. (111) 

 

Faced with his own death, Elya’s concern is for the good of those around him and for the 

strength of “human bonds.” We learn that despite all of the “failures” of Elya’s life – the 

coldness of his wife, the esthetic excesses of his children, other unrequited affections – he never 

gives up on the idea of “receiving Isaac back.” Sammler notes in Elya a longing, a demand from 

the “singular human creature […] when the sum of human facts could not yield more” (68). He 

faces his death and the eternal without giving up on the temporal world. He complies with tests 

that will not prolong his life and tries not to burden those whom he will leave behind: “He was 

the sort of individual from whom help emanated. There were no arrangements for return” (235). 

Sammler describes this as Elya’s “moment of honor […] that moment at which the individual 

could call upon all his best qualities” (66).  

Throughout the novel, Sammler goes to check in on Elya at the hospital and tries to make sure 

that he is comfortable. From Sammler’s other-worldly perspective, the best course is to make the 

transition to non-being or eternal-being as painless as possible. But Sammler discovers that his 

retreat from humanity is not what was desired by Elya or required of himself. What Elya needed 

was to communicate, to be alive even at the end, to have the chance to put things in order. 

Sammler realizes that by his retreat, he wronged Elya, though Elya would never say so, and 

probably would not even think so. Sammler is confronted with a duty on this earth that cannot be 

set aside even if he does not feel at home here. Elya’s example teaches Sammler that he must 

come back, a second time, to the land of the living.  

Bellow thus shows that he does not despair of the human capacity for goodness, happiness, 

and virtue. Not by reading or thinking more, not by better explanations or unique art, but rather 

through humane encounters with other human beings Sammler learns what his moral and 

spiritual duties are. Bellow shows that genuine ties to friends and family, grounded in the 

recognition of a common human condition, can provide the corrective to radical individualism, 

ethical passivity, and other-worldly orientations. After Elya dies, Sammler utters a prayer that 

indicates Sammler’s movements toward reconciliation with God, humanity, and himself: 

 

Remember, God, the soul of Elya Gruner, who, as willingly as possible and as well as 

he was able, and even to an intolerable point, and even in suffocation and even as death 

was coming was eager, even childishly perhaps (may I be forgiven for this), even with a 

certain servility, to do what was required of him. At his best this man was much kinder 

than at my very best I have ever been or could ever be. He was aware that he must meet, 

and he did meet – through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through 

which we are speeding – he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his 

inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it – 

that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know. (260) 

 



Bellow, Kierkegaard, and American Estheticism  78 

 

  

Bellow shows that the sacredness and dignity of human life will shine through and scatter even 

the darkest estheticism. Sammler learns that even Angela and Wallace are not as spiritually 

bankrupt as he first thought. All human beings are naturally oriented toward the transcendent 

source of order, meaning, and purpose; and from this orientation, goodness flows into humanity 

making it possible to receive the finite back – just like Abraham received Isaac back. There is an 

uncertainty in all of this (call it faith), but that is precisely wherein the dignity of humanity lies – 

it cannot be explained away through a system.  

If Bellow does not resolve the tensions in the lives of all of the characters, he surely points to 

some who have not turned their backs on themselves or on others. And he shows us that even 

someone as “self-contained” as Sammler can still learn from those around him. Bellow, like 

Kierkegaard, did not think that the task of becoming a true self was either inevitable or 

impossible, even in modernity. Instead, he shows that what appears to be “bourgeois 

philistinism” can mask the truly religious individual, while all of the reflective flirtations with 

the eternal can cover up a soul that still needs much improvement. Bellow’s work shows that part 

of being an authentic self is to care for others, a task that cannot be done adequately without 

knowing who one is in relation to the divine, and who one is in relation to the others. But simply 

knowing cannot be the end of the truest life, for compassion and love must come through in 

one’s actions and passions, which can change individuals and entire nations.   

 

 

Notes 

 

1. Kierkegaard 1980, 13. 

2. Ibid. 

3. Ibid. Anti-Climacus also states that “Every human existence that is not conscious of 

itself as spirit or conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence that 

does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests in and merges in some abstract 

universality (state, nation, etc.) or, in the dark about his self, regards his capacities 

merely as powers to produce without becoming deeply aware of their source, regards 

his self, if it is to have intrinsic meaning, as an indefinable something – every such 

existence whatever it achieves, be it most amazing, whatever it explains, be it the 

whole of existence, however intensively it enjoys life esthetically – every such 

existence is nevertheless despair” (46). Sammler makes a similar reflection: “You 

have been summoned to be. Summoned out of matter […] whether originating in a 

God or in an indeterminate source [obliges man] to wait, painfully, anxiously, 

heartachingly, in this yellow despair” (Bellow 2004, 72). 

4. I equate Kierkegaard’s own thought on this point with the view presented by Anti-

Climacus. 

5. When Kierkegaard or his pseudonyms use the term “universal,” he intends to 

designate the predominant ethical norms that a society passes on to its youth as the 



79  Romanello 

 

 

 

correct ways of living, not eternal or necessary truths in the Kantian sense (Evans 

2006, xx–xxii). 

6. Kierkegaard 1987, 50ff. 

7. Kierkegaard 1987, 294. 

8. The religiosity of the ethical life is far from the genuine faith of the religious life. In 

the former, suffering and guilt are far from the individual’s consciousness, whereas in 

the latter, they factor prominently into the constitution of the individual’s personality. 

9. Bellow 2004, 44. All subsequent in-text citations will be from this reference. 

10. Sammler criticizes and analyzes most of the other characters in a similar fashion. He 

comments on Shula’s erratic dress and behavior, her oscillations between Catholicism 

and Judaism, and her wild insistence that Sammler should write his memoire of 

Wells. He notes how Wallace, Gruner’s son, has amassed myriad strange experiences 

but has failed to settle into a profession or a relationship. Even Sammler’s evaluation 

of Margotte, whom he describes as a “good soul” (108), includes several descriptions 

of the seeming lack of order in her life: her house is filled with dead plants and 

useless appliances, she sees no ethical dilemma in accepting reparation money from 

the German government, and she prattles off intellectual arguments ad infinitum. 

11. During his “Bloomsbury days,” Sammler shared more fully the Judge’s optimism. 

During those pre-War years, Sammler thought that enlightened planning could 

generate remedies to humanity’s problems and that social progress was possible. 

12. See Bellow 2004, 36, 43, 46, 73, 75, 88, 94, 96, 98, and 105 for only a few of the 

other references to Sammler’s “longing for the eternal.” 

13. Kierkegaard 2006, 29. 

14. See Bellow 2004, 163: “And of course in Shula’s view [Sammler] had been getting 

too delicate for earthly life, too absorbed in unshared universals, excluding her […] 

she wished to implicate him and bring him back, to bind him and keep him in the 

world beside her.” 

 

 

Works Cited 

 

Bellow, Saul. 2004. Mr. Sammler’s Planet. New York: Penguin. 

Evans, C. Stephen. 2000. “Introduction.” In Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. C. 

Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vi–xxx. 

Kierkegaard, Søren. 1980. The Sickness unto Death. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and 

Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 

---. 1987. Either/Or, Part I. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, 

NJ: Princeton University Press. 



Bellow, Kierkegaard, and American Estheticism  80 

 

  

---. 2006. Fear and Trembling. Ed. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh. Trans. Sylvia Walsh. 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 


