Postmodernist Art In Philip Roth's American Pastoral

Philip Roth (1933-) is one of the most famous contemporary writers in America. Since the publication of his first book Goodbye, Columbus in1959, Roth has accomplished twenty-seven novels, two collections of critical essays, two non-fiction works and numerous short stories. Roth has almost received all the major literary awards in America. American Pastoral is the first novel of his "American Trilogy"; the other two novels are I Married a Communist and The Human Stain. These three novels are called "American problem novels" because they deal with American social issues after the Second World War. American Pastoral is about the tragedy of Seymour Levov, a third-generation American Jew, whose dream of being a real American collapses after his teenage daughter bombs the local post office in the protest against the Vietnam War. Soon after it was published, a large number of reviews and critical essays about the novel came out continuously. Most of these articles focus on the subjects of Jewish identities, American Dreams and post-war American landscape reflected in American Pastoral, and only a few of them touch on its postmodernist features. This thesis will lay the novel in the realm of postmodernism. By applying the theories of postmodernism and postmodernist fiction, the author discusses the novel's postmodernist art in respect of its multiple themes and strategies used to construct these themes.This thesis contains five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction which lays out the general purpose for the whole thesis. In this chapter, Philip Roth's life and literary career are introduced at first; next, the plot of American Pastoral is presented; then critical essays and monographs about Roth and his American Pastoral at home and abroad are reviewed and analyzed; at last, the objectives and structures of this thesis are displayed. Chapter two is the theoretical framework of this thesis which comprises two parts discussing the postmodernist theory and American postmodernist fiction respectively. The first part shows the basic ideas of postmodernism by contrasting it with modernism. The other part is about the development and features of American postmodernist fiction. Chapter three is concerned with American Pastoral's multiple themes in the domain of postmodernism. Chapter four is about Roth's postmodernist strategies to construct the novel's themes, which is subdivided into two sections:one section deals with the novel's major postmodernist writing techniques—arody and nostalgia; the other section is about its postmodernist narrative art in respects of the fragmented plot and Roth's treatment of historical texts. The last chapter is the conclusions of this thesis. Based on the analyses in the previous four chapters, this thesis reaches the following conclusions:firstly, living in post-war American society which is obviously characterized with postmodernist features, such as absurdity, irrationality, and fragmentation, American Jews are confronted with the conflict between their Jewishness and American main stream culture. When they are struggling to realize their American dreams in the postmodern society, many of them have noticed the illusionary and contradictory elements in the American Dream itself. Secondly, as a successful postmodernist fiction, while highlighting its postmodernist themes, American Pastoral demonstrates Roth's outstanding craftsmanship in novel construction. As for Roth's postmodernist writing techniques in the novel, he uses parody of biblical stories to reveal people's futile pursuit of American Dreams. And he sets a tragic tone for the novel by means of nostalgia. To speak of his narrative strategies, Roth's emphases on the fragmented plot and the blend of historical texts with fiction exert the absurdity and uncertainty of postmodernism to the greatest extent.