Abstract
An analysis of the Philip Roth’s sustained pursuit of his American identity mixed with his engagement with the trope of the American Adam is the center of this paper. From the outset of his career, Roth has sought to be understood as an American, not Jewish, writer. But as his career unfolded, the challenges of sustaining his American identity grew, whether in Portnoy’s Complaint, Sabbath’s Theatre or the American Trilogy. The confrontation between American and Judaic identities increasingly became his subject as his Jewish roots threatened his American identity stemming from a Protestant, if not Puritan, literary heritage. Coleman Silk and Swede Levov from The Human Stain and American Pastoral represent the challenge best summarized by Abe Ravelstein in Bellow’s eponymous novel when he remarks that “as a Jew you are also an American, but somehow you are not.” The paradox of Roth’s entanglement with the trope of the American Adam is that he both pursues and denies this identity, accepting its heroism but acknowledging its impossibility. One moment he publically declares “if I’m not an American, I am nothing,” but on the other, to be Roth he knows he must violate the Adamic ideal, prepared to renounce neither his American nor Jewish identities.
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Notes
Mickey Sabbath comes to a similar conclusion but for opposite reasons, refusing to commit suicide because life around him contains everything that he hates and he cannot give that up. The final sentence of Sabbath’s Theater reads: “He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here” (1995, p. 451).
Roth’s involvement with the suppressed writers of Europe in the series he edited in the seventies is a further sign of his response to Puritanical and totalitarian attitudes. His championing of Milan Kundera, Ivan Klima or Tadeusz Borowski underscores his commitment to free expression in the face of subjugation. But censors do appear in Roth and range from Judge Wapter in The Ghost Writer to the Prague police who demand the narrator’s copies of the Yiddish stories he tries to smuggle out of Czechoslovakia in The Prague Orgy. He could not avoid the paradoxes of Puritan behavior.
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Nadel, I. American Roth. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 12, 493–510 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-019-00257-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-019-00257-3