A Narcissist: A Psychological Analysis Of Coleman Silk In The Human Stain

Philip Roth is a significant Jewish American writer who is still active in the field of modern American literature. The Human Stain is Roth's contribution which completes his famous thematic"American Trilogy". In this novel, Roth transforms his former focus on Jewish experiences to the depiction of an African American man's suffering life. Based on the deep exploration and meditation on problems in the modern American society, The Human Stain has won for Roth France's Medici Foreign Book Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the WH Smith Literary Award etc. In The Human Stain, the narrator Nathan Zuckerman recalls that Coleman Silk, a Jewish professor of classical literature, is accused of a racist at the age of 71, for he has called two black students"spooks"in class. Then he starts a relationship with a cleaning woman Faunia Farley who is half his age. And Coleman is despised for this romance. In the later half of the novel, Coleman's real identity is exposed that he is an African American who passes for a Jew.The Human Stain has stirred great debates with its publication. Many critics provide various interpretations to the novel to explore the implied meaning. Most of them focus on themes, writing techniques, genre and the comparative study of this novel with other works, however, few has carried out the detailed psychological analysis of characters in the novel. Therefore, this paper, by careful analysis of the mental journey of the protagonist Coleman Silk in the light of Freudian Narcissism, exposes his inner world of tortures and the reasons for his pathological mental state. And from this point, an interpretation of Coleman's death mystery is proposed. The dissertation consists of five parts: in the introduction part, the general introduction to Roth, the novel The Human Stain, and literature review of the novel and Freudian Narcissism are presented; Chapter One exhibits Coleman's narcissistic characteristics, which proves he is a typical narcissist; Chapter Two comes up with the reasons for the formation of Coleman's narcissism; on the basis of the chapters above, the interpretation of Coleman's death mystery is explained in Chapter Three, proving that his death occurs under the repression of the narcissistic personality; in the conclusion part, the basic points in this paper are summarized that Coleman is a narcissist that shapes under the influence of the family, society and himself. His narcissistic personality leads to his final destruction.