The Perils of Desire in Philip Roth’s Early Fiction
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-2014
Abstract
In her article "The Perils of Desire in Roth's Early Fiction" Victoria Aarons posits that Philip Roth's first collection of stories Goodbye, Columbus is the prototype for a host of characters who emerge throughout his oeuvre: characters who are engaged as the inveterate Nathan Zuckerman insists, in "an exchange of existences" abandoning willingly "the artificial fiction" of an inherent, essential self." From the stories in Goodbye, Columbus to the "final" novels comprising the Nemesis tetralogy, Roth's characters perform a spectacle of selves engaged in the making of character. The making of character in Roth's fiction appears in two ways: 1) the developing of protagonists who emerge throughout the trajectory of Roth's extensive literary career and 2) each protagonist's individual psychic project of making himself his own favorite character. For Roth, character is all about motive, those oppositional and ambivalent impulses which drive people to perform acts of desperate self-assertion, all part of the masquerade of self-reinvention.
Identifier
10.7771/1481-4374.2402
Publisher
Purdue University
City
West Lafayette, IN
Repository Citation
Aarons, V. (2014). The perils of desire in Roth's early fiction. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 16(2). doi:10.7771/1481-4374.2402
Publication Information
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture