Constructing truth and reality: An examination of Philip Roth's 'written and unwritten worlds'

My study argues that all of Philip Roth's work from The Counterlife through American Pastoral reflect his fascination with "the relationship between the written and the unwritten world," a distinction he considers far more useful than the familiar contrast between illusion and reality or between literature and life. Roth thinks of truth and reality as psycho-linguistic constructs whose definitions are as subjective in life as they are in literature and vice versa. He summarizes this attitude in Nathan Zuckerman's statement from The Counterlife: "And as he spoke I was thinking, the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into." Later the idea becomes the epigraph for his autobiography The Facts, reinforcing its relevance for fiction and non-fiction alike.;Roth looks at the conjunction between the world of imagination and the world of experience by exploring various questions of identity, especially the mysteries of selfhood. By examining various facets of identity, for example, Jewish identity, the authorial ego, and mental health, he subverts existing ideas about what we label truth and reality by exposing their arbitrary nature.;His work emphasizes what Roth sees as a vital link between writers and everyone else as we attempt to answer the basic human query: Who am I? When the individual tries to develop his own identity, his authentic self , he assumes different roles just as the novelist must play different parts in order to develop his fictional characters. Thus, Roth adopts the trope that living is to role-playing as writing is to performance. According to Roth, the difficulty of unmasking the authentic self parallels the problem of discovering pure truth for both laymen and artists. He insists that "we are all writing fictitious versions of our lives all the time, contradictory but mutually entangling stories that...constitute our hold on reality and are the closest thing we have to the truth.";From The Counterlife through American Pastoral Roth continues to develop the metaphor that life is performance, especially for the novelist. Even when Roth becomes an autobiographer in The Facts and his father's biographer in Patrimony , he continues to stage his life as he would like it to be seen by his audience, suggesting that putting on a mask is part of life. Roth is aware of this artificiality and his sensitivity is reflected in discussions about the writing process which form an important subtext for all the books of this period, as integral to his discourse as questions of identity.