The Theme of Responsibility in the Novels of Bernard Malamud and James Baldwin

Bernard Malamud and James Baldwin are considered the most representative of Jewish American and African American writing respectively. In a writing career that spanned 45 years, Malamud created a bitter sweet image of humanity. He is not simply another Jewish American writer attempting to capture Jewish themes and commonplaces in his fiction, but a great American writer concerned with man and the deepest forces that have moved him whether they be religion, myth, folklore, or ritual. Malamud\'s fiction constitutes the significant world of man and what he makes himself of in the world he chooses. The richness of his style and literary idiom classify his works as classics placing him among the international writers.

Through his intensely personal art Baldwin achieved an extraordinary popular appeal which has made him one of the most widely read African writers in the twentieth century. A chronological study of Baldwin\'s works illustrates the deepening sense of responsibility of an individual from the inner self to the outer space, from a person centered world to the society he belongs to. Baldwin\'s concept of art and of himself as literary artist involves both personal and social responsibility implying a duty to call for the revival of the human values.

An attempt is made to make an in-depth study of two representative novelists of the two most powerful ethnic groups in the USA the Jews and Negroes to identify the national consciousness that reflects the evolution of an individual. Jews and Negroes has a bearing on the identity and traditional values of American society. (jacket)