Resist Oblivion And Regain Historical Consciousness: Roth's Parodic Reconstruction Of The Forgotten History In Indignation

As historical rewriting has been a heated topic in Rothian studies,Roth's reconstruction of the “silenced” history of the Korean War in Indignation has also been scrutinized by scholars,who attach greater importance to the character's identity crisis and traumatic memory.Yet Roth's parodic art and postmodern narrative strategies have received scant critical attention,let alone his fluid historical consciousness revealed in Indignation.In the light of Roth's interviews and correspondence,literary theories about historical consciousness,postmodern parody,and New Historicism,this thesis studies how historical consciousness is embodied explicitly and implicitly in the three-layered parodic rewriting of history,by virtue of textual analysis and discourse analysis.At the story level,Roth playfully portrays the protagonist Marcus as the modern incarnation of Oedipus.Although the two bear resemblance in terms of paradoxical fate and personality,the critical distance lies in their loss of consciousness.Oedipus is ignorant of self-identity while Marcus lacks basic understanding of history.In addition,Roth's de-crowning of the Greek hero to a coward also casts an ironic light on the long-standing hero-worship in traditional war literature.At the discourse level,Roth's parodic reconstruction involves the literary genres like autobiography and traditional historical fiction.The dominant first-person narrative and pervasive documentary sources in the first half of the novel have established the trustworthiness of the autobiographical narrative,but it is smashed by highlighted fictionality and narrativity in the latter half.Meanwhile,the spatialized narrative,unreliable narrative,and authorial intrusion problematize the linearity,reliability,and totality advocated by traditional historians.On the whole,Indignation is actually a parody of Roth's own previous works and Marcus is a parodic version of the real-life Roth,from which the fluidity of his historical consciousness is unearthed and his call for the lost communal consciousness is fully unveiled.