| Ibis thesis considers the social role of the novelist and the value of the novel as a discursive form in Philip Roth's American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, which together form the American Trilogy. Critical consideration of the three novels together has unified them as Roth's "political" books, focusing almost exclusively on the historical, social, and ethnic tensions characteristic of the novels' subject matter and embodied by their main characters. Such approaches, however, ignore that Roth presents these embattled characters through the perspective of novelist Nathan Zuckerman, who is positioned as both participatory narrator and purported "author" of these books. In doing so, Roth shifts his attention away from the surface concerns of these tensions and towards the ways in which the novelist translates real people and real events into fiction. Incorporating M.M. Bakhtin's conceptualization of the novel as a dialogic form and Adriana Cavarero's assertion that narrating others constitutes a political act, this study examines Zuckerman's efforts, as a novelist, to both contend with and incorporate the many divergent, ideologically-charged accounts of his main characters in his own self-consciously fictional treatments of their lives. Set during particularly aggravated moments in American history, these novels depict the potential for personal and social oppression enabled by what Cavarero identifies as our fundamental vulnerability to how others narrate us. In contrast to the efforts of all others who seek to definitively and tyrannically narrate, label, and expose these characters, Roth advances a vision of the novelist and the novel as preservers of personal privacy, democratic freedom, and the philosophical secrecy of other people. |
