The American Dream In American Pastoral

Philip Roth(1933—), as one of the most influential Jewish writers in contemporary American literature, has published over twenty novels so far. Published in1997and winning the Pulitzer Prize in the following year, American Pastoral is generally acclaimed as one of his best. It demonstrates the historical reality of American Jewish immigrant communities and American society in the past half century after the Second World War. American Pastoral vividly depicts the quest for the American Dream of Jewish immigrants of different generations and their final tragedies. Roth focuses on impact of all kinds of ideology of American culture on Jewish values in the course of national integration, which shows his great concern about his Jewish heritage and identity as well as American culture.Starting from the evolution of the American Dream, this thesis attempts to analyze the novel from the perspective of the American Dream and interpret different manifestations of the Dream in order to investigate underlying factors leading to its disillusionment. Jewish Americans of several generations pursue their own versions of the Dream. Though their dreams are different in content and form, the essence that include both wealth prosperity and spiritual satisfaction is the same. The Jewish values empasizing spirit supremacy and the American pragmatism are fundamentally opposite, thus it is difficult for Jewish Amecians who on one hand long for assimilation into the mainstream society and on the other hand hold tight to their Jewish identity to realize their American Dreams. Analyzing the tragedy of the Levov famliy from social cultural and historical perspectives, Roth thinks that contemporary Jewish Americans should pursue their dreams with expections in accord with real life of American society and strengthen exchanges and communication in the process of their integration into the mainstream American society and culture in order to fulfill their own American Dream.