Jewish American Nightmares In American Pastoral

The thesis is a study of Jewish American Dream represented in Philip Roth's novel American Pastoral through the nightmarish experience of Levov family in postwar America, mainly from the 1940s to the 1970s. As an everlasting motif in American life and literature, American Dream is embraced by Jewish people and reflects the complex changes of Jewishness and American culture in postwar America.Philip Roth is one of the most prominent and controversial contemporary Jewish American novelists. American Pastoral (1997), his 1997 Pulitzer Prize winner, is one of the best in the 27 novels which he has published so far. The novel has aroused heated discussion since the day of its publication in the West, however, in China, besides several scholarly papers, Chinese critics have yet to pay it due attention. This. thesis is intended to explore the Jewish American nightmares revealed in the novel.This thesis consists of six parts. The first part serves as an introduction, which presents a detailed literature review regarding American Pastoral as well as the general background of Jewish American literature and the novelist Philip Roth. Thus the research gaps, questions and significance are explicated.Chapter One deals with various Jewish American dreams. American Pastoral is mainly concerned with the three generations of Levov family: Lou, "the Swede" (Seymour) and Merry, which corresponds to the three critical times in America, namely, the 1940s, the 1950s and the 1960s. Different times endow people with different dreams. Their American dreams are sharply different in essence, although they share some similarities in form and spiritual sense.Chapter Two, "Jewish American Nightmares", examines what these various Jewish American dreams come to be. What they most cherish in their respective American dreams unexceptionally turns out to be the opposite. Each generation is rebellious against the early one, a symbol indicating the failure of the early one.Chapter Three explores the root of the Jewish American nightmares from cultural and social perspectives. Merry's bomb reveals and is rooted in the serious conflicts between Jewish tradition and American culture, as well as the American contemporary social conditions which have experienced subtle and profound changes since WWII. These conflicts constitute the counter part of the original idealistic meaning of American Dream, which makes the American dreams of the three Jewish generations doomed to become American nightmares.Chapter four concentrates on Roth's insights into the Jewishness of American Jews and American Dream in postwar America. Roth reveals his complex and even contradictory ideas with the help of peculiar narrative techniques, for example, the overlapping of the writer Roth, the narrator Zuckerman and the protagonist Swede; the secret coincidence of the spirit of Roth, Zuckerman, Jerry and Merry; and the conflicting voices of different characters in Zuckerman's narration and Swede's broken memories.Finally, based on the discussion in the above four chapters, the thesis may come to the following conclusions. In American Pastoral Roth presents and explores an overall picture of several generations' Jewish American nightmares in the postwar era. From these Jewish nightmares we see a Jewish dilemma instead of a Jewish paradise, a new Diasporic land instead of a new home, and a modem wasteland instead of a "promised land". Meanwhile the exploration of these Jewish American nightmares indicates Roth's complex and even contradictory attitude toward different Jewish American dreamers, Jewish tradition and American culture in postwar America.