Introduction
The humor in Saul Bellow's fiction (1915–2005) primarily revolves around the theme of shame. His protagonists are often arrogant, self-assured, and headstrong individuals who see themselves as exceptional and above ordinary struggles. However, circumstances ultimately reveal their misconceptions about themselves. They are always brought down and taught a lesson by “a comic scourging made to run the full gauntlet of embarrassment, mockery, ridicule, humiliation, mortification, and disgrace” [1]. Bellow's protagonists include characters like Joseph from Dangling Man (1944), who is deeply ashamed of being unemployed and dependent on his wife while waiting to be drafted into World War II. His embarrassment is so overwhelming that he avoids friends and family and even fears being seen in public. Another example is Tommy Wilhelm from Seize the Day (1956), who is swindled out of his remaining money by a fraudulent doctor and, when seeking assistance from his aging father, is met with rejection, "'Go away from me now. It's torture for me to look at you, you slob!'" [3]. Tommy ends up lamenting, "I'm stripped and kicked out." [3]. Then there is Eugene Henderson of Henderson the Rain King (1959) who is initiated into an African tribe by running naked through the village. Poor Moses Herzog, in Herzog (1964), is a cuckold whose wife has a public affair with his best friend, but Herzog is the last to find out. Sammler, in Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), is publicly humiliated by a heckler who disrupts Sammler's speech at Columbia University. And Charlie Citrine, in Humboldt's Gift (1975), is deceived by his fiancee who leaves him babysitting her son in Madrid while she is in another city marrying another man. In all these comedies of shame, Bellow seems to imply the notion that a sense of humiliation is good for one’s soul.
Shame and Humiliation
While shame is a prominent emotion in Bellow's stories, guilt is equally significant. Psychoanalyst Andrew P. Morrison (1989) [4] suggests that "shame shares the spotlight with other painful feelings, principally guilt and anxiety" (p. 43). The character’s guilt is deeply tied to their sense of shame. Guilt and shame are often linked emotions, both of which can arise from the same action. While guilt stems from the awareness of having done something wrong, shame results from a lowered sense of self-worth due to that action [4].
In every narrative, there comes a point when the Bellow protagonist – like Louie in Something to Remember Me By (1991) – experiences a profound moment of shame that momentarily robs him of both his sense of self and his grasp on reality. Through action, meditation, or storytelling, he seeks to overcome his shame, reclaim his identity, and reinterpret his world. The narrative takes the form of a memoir, in which an elderly man recounts to his son a humiliating experience from his teenage years when he was a seventeen-year-old high school senior, while his mother was dying of cancer at home: Deceived by a prostitute who stole his clothes and ran off, Louie was forced to wear a woman's dress and struggle to get home through the harsh Chicago winter." Stripped and kicked out," Louie is another typical Bellow hero.
This shameful experience is intended to bring or initiate young Louie into "the facts of life", as he says, primarily the two taboo subjects of sex and death, which are closely connected in the story:
In my time my parents didn't hesitate to speak of death and the dying. What they seldom mentioned was sex. We've got it the other way around [6].
Louie is led by his lust which causes his feeling of shame and degradation. He feels so ashamed of his desires to have sex with the mother that he wishes her dead. Therefore, he always tries to avoid facing his mother: "I knew she was dying and didn't allow myself to think about it" [2] and "I was secretive about my family life. The truth is that I didn't want to talk about my mother" [2]. Louie’s avoidance is related to his guilt for having a sexual desire toward his mother. This is repeatedly shown when Louie sees a dead pigeon in the street. He is careful to deny the event any significance or any connection to him:
This had nothing to do with me. I mention it merely because it happened. I stepped around the blood spots and crossed into the park [2].
The denial highlights once again his tendency to evade death or any accountability for its existence. He is in “a cycle of denial, guilt, and shame which mutually reinforce one another” [5].
Louie feels ashamed of his relationships with the other female figures that dominate him and are all associated with the mother. The image of his dying mother resting in bed is mirrored in the way Louie’s girlfriend, Stephanie, reclines in the park as they embrace intimately, Louie mentions:
To the right of the path, behind the wintry lilac twigs, the crust of the snow was broken. In the dead black night Stephanie and I had necked there, petted, my hands under her raccoon coat, under her sweater, under her skirt, adolescents kissing without restraint. Her coonskin cap had slipped to the back of her head. She opened the musky coat to me to have me closer [2].
The other female figure is the dead girl whom Louie used to put flowers on her coffin. When Louie once sees the dead girl in her coffin, he associates her with Stephanie: "a girl older than Stephanie, not so plump" [2]. He feels ashamed in the presence of the girl's mother, "ashamed to take money from her within sight of her dead daughter"[2]. Once again, he denies any connection to the death, "I didn't figure here, however; this was no death of mine" [2].
Lying on a doctor's table as a volunteer for one of his experiments in sexology, the naked prostitute is, once again, associated with his mother and Stephanie:
Although I tried hard to stop it, my mother's chest mutilated by cancer surgery passed through my mind. Its gnarled scar tissue. I also called in Stephanie's closed eyes and kissing face-anything to spoil the attraction of this naked young woman [2].
As she gets dressed, Louie observes that this woman, like Stephanie, is wearing a raccoon coat. Stephanie is additionally linked to the prostitute through her sexuality:
She [Stephanie] loved a good time. And when I wouldn't take her downtown to the Oriental Theatre she didn't deny herself the company of other boys. She brought back off-color vaudeville jokes [2].
The last female figures in the story are the drunk's two little daughters whom Louie meets when driving their father home. Since Louie is at this point wearing a dress, they are uncertain if he is a man or a woman. To find out, the younger one spies on him:
She grinned at me. She was expecting her second teeth. Today all females were making sexual fun of me, and even the infants were looking lewd [2].
Tricked, cheated, and made fun of, Louie consistently feels shamed by women.
Louie faces mockery from both women and men. His father also physically abuses him, adding another layer of disgrace. He calls his father "an intolerant, hasty man. If I were to turn up in this filthy dress, the old man, breaking under his burdens, would come down on me in a blind, Old Testament rage. I never thought of this as cruelty but as archaic right everlasting" [2]. Although Louie seems to have resigned himself to his father's abuse, his association with a prostitute and late-night returns are unmistakably acts of defiance against his domineering, furious father.
Louie is also mocked by his older brother Albert: "'La-di-dah,' my critical, satirical brother Albert called me" [2] "Toward me, Albert was scornful. He said, 'You don't understand fuck-all. You never will'" [2]. Albert's mockery is a form of sexual taunting, implying that Louie is less masculine: the phrase "La-di-dah" suggests that Louie is gay, while "You don't understand fuck-all. You never will" indicates that Louie will always remain inexperienced, both in worldly matters and in sexual knowledge. Albert embodies a model that Louie both resents and desires, a gender role that Louie finds unattainable.
The figure of Albert is repeated in the story by the bartender who mocks Louie: "'You got a lot to learn, buddy boy'" [2]. Louie feels inadequate when confronted with the bartender who knows how to handle the prostitute:
Why didn't I push her down while she was still in her coat, as soon as we entered the room-pull up her clothes, as he would have done? Because he was born to that. While I was not. I wasn't intended for it [2].
Due to guilt, Louie suppresses his aggression, including his sexual impulses, but this causes him to feel like less than a man, leading to a sense of shame.
Since Louie feels disconnected from both his authoritarian father and his tough older brother Albert, there are very few positive male figures he can look up to. One of them is his laid-back brother-in-law Philip, who lives with the family and acts as a kind of surrogate, more understanding older brother for Louie. He describes Philip to the prostitute:
He's a good guy. He likes to lock the office on Friday and go to the races. He takes me to the fights. Also, at the back of the drugstore there's a poker game… [2].
Philip is associated with masculine activities: drinking, going to the fights or the races, and playing poker. He is also a strong man: "The strength of his arms counted when it came to pulling teeth" [2]. Nevertheless, Philip has his defects: he is so lazy that he lacks ambition. His wife, Louie's sister Anna, seems to have more ambition and, in that sense, to be more of a man than Philip: "My sister wants him to open a Loop office, but that would be too much of a strain" [2]. "Anna had him dressed up as a professional man, but he let the fittings-short, tie, buttons-go their own way" [2]. Louie feels some contempt for Philip. He is not an acceptable male role model for Louie either.
The last male character in the story is the intoxicated McKern, whom Louie is tasked with guiding home. He represents the weakest individual in the narrative. McKern serves as an anti-self, embodying everything Louie feels most ashamed of: lacking self-control, being emasculated, and exhibiting helpless, childlike behavior. Therefore, Louie feels degraded by his company: "I had little sympathy for McKern" [2].
With the loss of his clothes, Louie suffers a loss of identity as a male. It is this which most shames him:
Instead of a desirable woman, I had a drunkard in my arms. This disgrace, you see, while my mother was surrendering to death a deathwatch. I should have been there, not on the far North side [2].
More than fifty years after the incident, he continues to hold himself responsible: "I failed my mother!" [2]. The weight of his guilt is immense, and he may share this painful story with his son as a form of atonement, attempting to compensate for his feelings of failure toward his parents. Instead of concealing his shame, he confronts it through confession, an act of bravery.
The story not only acts as Louie's confession and penance, but it may also have a healing role for the narrator, helping to mend a broken self and world. As Helen [6] explains, the experience of shame has three key components: unexpected exposure "which leads to a sense of confusion” incongruity, which "violates our previous image of ourselves" and a threat to trust, which "results in a shattering of trust in oneself, even in one's own body and skill and identity, and in the trusted boundaries or framework of the society and world one has known” (p. 201). Louie experiences all these effects of shame, leading him to question not just his identity, but also the world around him. Throughout the story, he must restore his sense of masculinity and regain his understanding of the world.
Besides its reparative function, the story may also serve an educational function, as a way to teach his son "the facts of life" – the facts of sex and death-and as a lesson to him not to repeat Louie's mistakes. In the final lines, he says:
I haven't left a large estate, and this is why I have written this memoir, a sort of addition to your legacy [2].
Finally, in writing this memoir, Louie opens himself up to his son. The narrative is an act of love which proves that Louie tries to be a better father than his own father was, relating to his son through kind words rather than through angry blows.
Conclusion
Bellow's Something to Remember Me By illustrates that shame, rather than being merely a burden, can serve as a transformative force. Through the protagonist’s humiliating experience, Bellow reveals how confronting and confessing shame can foster growth, self-awareness, and ultimately, deeper human connection. The story suggests that shame, when acknowledged, can perform reparative and educational functions, leading not to isolation but to love. In this way, Bellow portrays shame as a deeply humanizing emotion – one that, rather than diminishing us, can bring us closer to understanding ourselves and others.
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