earticle

영어

In “Looking for Mr. Green,” Saul Bellow exemplifies false consciousness and the class stratification of a capitalist society. False consciousness is a kind of ideology that the bourgeois generate to sustain power over proletarians, according to Marxists. Capitalism, religion, racism, and the American dream become instrumental for the bourgeois to create false consciousness. Armed with God, pseudo-science, and tempting dreams, the bourgeois indoctrinate the proletariat the legitimacy of the difference between the two classes. The former justifies the failure and poverty of the latter. False consciousness solidifies the social stratification by substantiating their power with the accumulation of wealth. All the characters in Bellow’s short story are tainted by the false consciousness and suffer from the vain belief. Bellow visualizes the hypocrisy of capitalism through Mr. Raynor who believes in the fairness of capitalism, the protagonist George Grebe who lives a proletarian’s life while dreaming the American dream, Staika who manipulates the ideology of the dominance for her own sake, and Mr. Green, the invisible black man. This paper deconstructs the entity of capitalism embedded in “Looking for Mr. Green” through a Marxist reading of the story.