A Religion Of Life In Philip Roth's Everyman

Philip Roth,one of the most influential Jewish writers in contemporary American Literature,shifts his attention to illness,aging,dying and death in his later writings—known as the Tetralogy of the Grave.Everyman,as the most successful one among them,presents an unnamed protagonist who strives for the meaning of life in old age ridden by illness and the threats of death.Academic circles tend to explore the theme of death and fear in Everyman from the perspectives of existentialism and trauma theory and focus on the protagonist's identity crisis and moral predicament from the angles of psychoanalysis and ethics,whereas Roth's intention to reconstruct a religion of life is by and large overlooked.The protagonist openly declares that he has stopped taking Judaism seriously since he was thirteen and that the “superstitious folderol” of religion is meaningless.His early rejection of the institutionalized religion has been widely misread as the author's lack of religious concern in this novel.However,under close scrutiny,the protagonist has made utmost efforts to meet various needs of life with piety in his lifetime,and his reverence for life embodies a ‘religion of life'.It can be argued that the whole life of the protagonist is a dynamic construction of a true religion — a religion of life;with a background of the absence of God and the decline of religion,the protagonist's religion does undergo a loss of religious faith,but gradually,he finds a much stronger faith in life.With his lifelong attempts to escape from death,he accepts love as his salvation in his religion and tries art as the expression of the meaning of life and transcendence of life.In this religious pursuit,he comes to,still with his pious love for life,accept death as an essential part of life.With focus on the protagonist's underlying obsession with his own religion in life,this research intends to explore how the protagonist interprets his religion with this only life from three aspects.Firstly,to show that Everyman provides a historicalcontext of the declining of religion by analysis of the important historical events that the protagonist has experienced in his life and to illustrate the protagonist's psychological process of his rejection to institutionalized religion by interpreting his hesitations to religion.Secondly,to point out that the religious pursuit Roth reconstructs is based on the faith in the supernatural and mystic side of life rather than God in traditional religion by analysis of the protagonist's attempts to take good care of his life at any cost and to illustrate that love is the core of Roth's religion of life by analyzing the protagonist's persistent pursuit of marital love and familial love.Thirdly,to reveal that art is the ritualized expression of meaning of life by interpreting the protagonist's pursuit for art to make a meaning of life and to indicate that death can be transcended by analysis of the protagonist's exploration for the meaning of life after death.In short,combined with the theory of religion of life,the research hopes to illustrate that Roth aims to reconstruct the possibilities of human's spiritual world by his novel Everyman through close reading and detailed analyses.Roth presents that people in contemporary life still need to have a religious pursuit based on the premise that they can live out the quality of life and enjoy the pleasure in life with a background of the absence of God and the decline of religion.