A Narrative Semiotic Analysis On The Plot Against America

Philip Roth is one of the most talented and successful writers in America and thegreatest history recorder of20th century. The Plot Against America, released in2004,is one of his boldest creations with strong fictionality. Most reviews and academicresearch concerning The Plot Against America are from the perspective of historic orrealistic perspectives. A narrative semiotic approach adopted in this paper is a boldattempt to analyze this novel from the perspective of structuralism.The narrative semiotic theory is founded by the representative of French semioticschool, Algirdas Julien Greimas(1917-1992). Greimas contends that although literaryworks diverse in various ways, they share certain universality and follow the same orsimilar narrative “grammar” in structure. Greimas’ semiotic theory in narrativesconsists of three levels, namely, the discursive level, the narrative level and the deeplevel.This thesis applies this semiotic theory to examine The Plot Against Americafrom these three levels. On the discursive level, different narrative “voices” are takenas the individual analysis unit and each voice is divided into three time periods withLindbergh’s presidency being the division criteria to carry out the surface analysis. Onthe narrative level, based on the division of “voices” and the three Greimassian pairsof oppositions, different protagonists are found out and5actantial schemas areextracted. On the thematic level, three Semiotic Squares are extracted, revealing thevalues and themes behind the text.The author believes that to study The Plot Against America by analyzing thediscursive level, the narrative level and the deep level is a complete new attempt, andmost of all, it helps more to better ravel out the narrative clarity of the text. This thesisdemonstrates that the Geimassian narrative semiotics could be applied to bothcomplex and thousand–page long novels and the simplest of narrative units. In themeanwhile, with the application of three Semiotic Squares, the themes and valuesbehind the text are revealed, that is, the author’s genuine care and concern about Jewsand a mock of American“democracy” which collapses at the first blow when facedwith threaten.