Everyman's Complaint

Presented in the thesis is a study of Sabbath's Theatre by Philip Roth, a seemingly vulgar and indignant novel published in 1995. Philip Roth is one of the most prominent and prolific Jewish American writers whose works are usually most warmly welcomed by readers and critics alike. However, among his great bulk of works, the National Book Award winner of 1995 Sabbath's Theatre has hardly received due critical attention both at home and abroad. By means of textual analysis and comparative study, the thesis is intended to examine and explore Mickey Sabbath, the protagonist's painful self-identity and life-pursuit, revealing the dissipative hero's unspoken inner suffering disguised under a shallow and lecherous surface.For many years, the self-identity of contemporary Jewish Americans has been an obsessive theme in Roth's novels. In fact, like many of his protagonists, Roth himself has also suffered painfully the conflict between the writer's identity and the Jewish ethnicity as well as between the real life and the written world. As a result, he enthusiastically resorts to those literary characters and portrays their miserable suffering and struggles during the painstaking process of self-identity.In the novel Sabbath's Theatre, the protagonist Mickey Sabbath has also gone through his desperate pursuit of an integrated selfhood. However, unlike other characters Roth has conceived in his previous novels, Sabbath's crisis of self-identity originates from a series of severe losses and bears no relation to his Jewish identity. Sabbath's arduous journey of self-identity reveals the common desperation of modern people when dealing with series traumas in a frustrating life. In this sense, Roth's concern is extended from Jewish Americans to the modern people as a whole.What calls for particular attention is that in the novel, Roth has adopted quite an objective and calm attitude throughout his narration. There is no longer the crucial contempt for modern Jewish Americans or the dense involvement of Roth's own life into the characters. For these reasons, it is proposed in the thesis that in the novel Sabbath's Theatre, Roth has achieved significant self-transcendence from Jewish themes to universal subjects as well as from a passionate racial betrayer to a calm observer.In this way, Roth has truly turned himself into "a writer who happens to be a Jew". Though Sabbath's pursuit of self-identity ended up with complete failure, Roth's own selfhood has been greatly achieved.