A Study of the Changing Main Characters in American Novels after World WarII and a New Trend in American Literature

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In this study, I intend to show how main characters in American hovels have changed after World War II in order to define a new trend of American literature in the 21st century.The main characters in the 1950s and 1960s are often regarded as anti-heroes. I clarified the nature of the anti-heroes of each decade by analyzing the main characters of J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth with the three criteria of an American hero given by R. W. B. Lewis : 1) to be superior to ordinary people, 2) to be free from both social and racial ties, and 3) to have strong principles in leading their lives.The heroic nature of main characters keeps declining dramatically through the Vietnam War, the counter culture, and the oil crises in the 1970s. And when American society becomes extremely conservative in the 1980s, American literature deals with more everyday materials and scenes. Accordingly its main characters become ordinary, too. I examined this change by discussing Bernard Malamud's novels, as well as the change in the attitudes towards marriage expressed by Saul Bellow's early and later characters. I also examined a new type of war novels in the 1960s written by Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, and compared J. D. Salinger's war stories based on World War II and Tim O'Brien's war novel based on the Vietnam War, in order to disclose how the changing social attitudes affected their main characters.In the end, observing the main characters after the 1980s, I paid special attention to Walter Abish because of his radical humanistic attitude towards dealing with reality. Together with the post-modern style of his writing, it could indicate a new trend in American literature.