An Intertextual Interpretation Of Philip Roth's Everyman

Philip Roth is a famous Jewish novelist in the USA.For his large number of fictions,Roth is well-known as a "Living Literary Legend".Exploring various themes and fictional techniques,Roth's works are noted for his stylistic description and narration of the nature of human beings.Everyman is one of Roth's best works worth investigating and interpreting from various perspectives.Everynman recounts an ordinary man's life and death.The story starts with the funeral of the protagonist,which also implies the tragic ending of the story.The fiction presents the confusion,helplessness and contemplation of the protagonist through different flashbacks.Before the beginning of the fiction,the third stanza of Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats appears,seemingly like a foreword to Everyman.Inspired by the theory of intertextuality,this paper attempts to explore the structural and thematic relationships between Everyman and Ode to a Nightingale.From the perspective of intertextuality,Everyryman and Ode to a Nightingale seem to share a very similar structure.From the operation at the age of nine to the numerous illnesses in his old age,the life of the protagonist has been full of pains and diseases.The various suffering of the protagonist in Everyman coincides with the descriptions of life in Ode to a Nightingale.The vicissitudes of the protagonist's life could be symbolized separately by "youth","grey hairs" and"groan" in Ode to a Nightingale.From the perspective of intertextuality,Everyman and Ode to a Nightingale seem to share some common themes:fear,death,and solitude.It is apparent when we read Everyman in comparison with the other four poems of Keats.All these themes accompany the protagonist's various dilemmas in Everyman.In fact,some other characters and the protagonist are equally important in the fiction.And these characters seem to imply different ordinary people in the society.Just as Ode to a Nightingale,in which Keats uses his unique poetic imagination to praise nightingale,Everyman seems an ode to all ordinary men,in which Philip Roth uses his unique fictional deployment and writing techniques.In conclusion,the theory of intertextuality provides a different possible approach and a new interpretation to Everyman.The demonstrations of the structural and thematic intertextuality between Eveyman and Ode to a Nightingale would be beneficial for readers to appreciate the internal logical deployment and philosophical implications of Everyman by Philip Roth.