Roth's Double Identity example essay topic

Philip Roth - Master of the "Double Identity" because he suffers from one What influences one's identity? Is it their homes, their parents, their religion, or maybe where they live? When do they get one? Do they get it when they understand right from wrong, or when they can read, or are they born with it? Everyone has one and each identity is unique, or is it? In literature, (or life) religion plays a large role in a character's identity.

However, sometimes the writer's own religion and personal experiences shapes the character's identity more than his / her imagination does. A person's religion can play a big role in one's identity. Throughout his works, Philip Roth explores the theme of identity doubles. Roth's portrayal of identity formation in his characters is directly inspired by his own identity; his life. One of the most obvious examples of Roth's art imitating life is in two of his books naming the main characters after none other than himself. It was among some of the many startling gestures in his career; in Deception (1990) he referred to the main character as Philip and in Operation Shylock (1993) he made reference to the main character as Philip Roth.

In her article titled, "Philip Roth's Fictions of Self Exposure", Debra Shostak remarks how odd it is for an author to outwardly make reference to themselves when most authors want avoid any personal association with their work other than writing it, she further points out that Roth intentionally writes this way, making his career out of his reader's inclinations toward "biographical interpretations": Few writers dare to name themselves at the center of their inventions, which is why it is so arresting to find a work of fiction that pronounces its author's name within the text. Because readers are frequently tempted, from either prurient interest or more impartial motives, to discern autobiography in a fictional narrative, most writers of fiction seem to labor out of modesty, a sense of privacy, or a display of imaginative capacities to erase the traces of their own lives from their work. Not so Philip Roth. Especially since his invention of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth has encouraged readers to interpret the narrative voice of his fiction as a self-revealing 'I,' a Roth surrogate who, by the time of Deception and Operation Shylock, is no longer a surrogate but is 'Roth' himself... What I argue here is not that Roth is, strictly, writing autobiographically, but rather that he makes capital out of his readers' inclinations toward biographical interpretations of his work.

The 'Roth' in the text must always be read in quotation marks, even when seemingly most unmediated, in order to underscore the indeterminacy of the 'Roth' who appears in each narrative and to distinguish this 'Roth' from the man who writes the books and lives in Connecticut - a distinction the texts labor to obscure. On the last page of Philip Roth's memoir Patrimony (1991), he tells of a terrifying dream that came in the weeks following the burial of his father, an assimilated secular Jew who had never expressed any particular inclination toward faith. Responding to the mortician's request that he choose a suit for the burial, he inexplicably acted on a religious impulse to bury his father in an old prayer shawl. In the dream, Herman Roth appeared to resentfully criticize his son's choice: One night some six weeks later, at around 4: 00 a. m., he came in a hooded white shroud to reproach me. He said, "I should have been dressed in a suit.

You did the wrong thing". I awakened screaming. All that peered out from the shroud was the displeasure in his dead face. And his words were a rebuke: I had dressed him for eternity in the wrong clothes. (237) Though Roth has often disputed claims that his fictional representations of familial conflict are in any way autobiographical, passages such as this recollection of a juvenile nightmare suggest that the novelist has long been interested in the creative fallout from anxieties about his relation to the secular legacy of his parents' generation, privately and publicly. Later, in Sabbath's Theater (1995), he had the title character emerge from the funeral of his closest friend to say remorsefully that "it's putting corpses into clothes that really betrays what great thinkers we are" (413).

The intensely psychological problem of dressing his dead father "for eternity in the wrong clothes", hints toward a textual correspondence with his Indecisive representations of "Jewish ness" throughout his Controversial career. One could say that Roth's works read so close to his life that he is obsessed with balancing the line between reality and fiction. In his article, "Texts, Lives, and Bellybuttons: Philip Roth's Operations Shylock and the Renegotiation of Subjectivity", Derek Parker Royal reiterates these claims but also states that Roth is engaged in a more " philosophical investigation, an exploration that highlights interrelationship between autobiography and fiction. He (Roth) calls this textual preoccupation, in one of his earlier essays, 'the relationship between the written and the unwritten world': The worlds that I feel myself shuttling between everyday couldn't be more succinctly described. Back and forth, back and forth, bearing fresh information, detailed instructions, garbled messages, desperate inquiries, naive expectations, baffling challenges. in all, cast somewhat in the role of the courier Barnabas, whom the Land Surveyor K. enlists to traverse the steep winding road between the village and the castle in Kafka's novel about the difficulties of getting through. (Reading Myself and Others pp ix-x) Royal discusses that since Roth has spent the better part of his career traveling between these two worlds so many times it's difficult to tell "which is the village and which is the castle".

Is the castle a metaphor for the written world, the modernist high ground of art, as the young Nathan Zuckerman would believe; or is it instead the domain of 'the facts,' the lived world from which art ultimately emanates and takes its sustenance? For literary critics, of course, this distinction is moot. The 'garbled messages' and 'baffling challenges' themselves are the points of departure, arrival, and the message, all rolled into one. Roth's double identity exists from his secular upbringing, but extremely religious tendencies; many of Roth's characters throughout his works have had issues with their "Jewish ness". Roth himself has struggled with this part of his identity, clearly why he creates vacillating characters, not sure of their own self.

Bibliography

Royal. Derek, Parker "Texts, Lives and Bellybuttons: Philip Roth's Operations Shylock and the Renegotiation of Subjectivity, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Fall 2000, Vol.
19, Issue 1 Roth. Philip. Author's Note, Reading Myself and Others, expanded Ed. New York: Penguin, 1985, pp.
ix-x. Roth. Philip. Patrimony: A True Story. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991.
Pg 237 Roth. Philip. Sabbath's Theater. Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
pg 414 Shostak. Debra". Philip Roth's Fictions of Self Exposure" Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies Fall 2000, Vol.