On Jewishness In Roth's Stories

From the first book Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, the Jewish critics and rabbis charged the American Jewish writer Philip Roth with anti-Semitism. However, Roth's books were not ignored by the American readers; instead, the readers found the values of his books. Roth won lots of awards, including National Book Award and Pulitzer Award. Though he is 73 years old, he still works hard to write remarkable stories. In 2004, Roth published his latest book The Plot against America, which won WH Smith Award in the winter of 2005. The study of Roth was hot in the U.S.A, where millions of papers and books on Roth were published, but in China, few papers on Roth were published and no books that studied on Roth were published till now.Through analyzing Roth's works, the author divided Roth's literary career into fourperiods. From 1959 to 1969, Roth experimented with different skills of writing in hisstories. Though he described the real lives of suburban American Jews, he did not stick tohis style of writing when the Jewish readers criticized him fiercely. In When She wasGood (1967), he turned to write about the non-Jews. From 1969 to 1979, Roth got rid ofthe obstacles in his heart and began to write freely. The hesitation disappeared, and Rothboldly wrote the Jews' lives and revolted against Jewish tradition. He went mature duringthis period. From 1979 to 2000, Zuckerman became the frequent character of Roth'sbooks. Zuckerman stories indicated the maturity of Roth who formed his own style ofwriting. Roth even started to write metafiction to discuss the issues about literature.Meanwhile, Roth showed his concerns about both national and international politicalissues in his stories. From 2000, Roth tried to discuss the problems of American societyin his book, which could be found in Human Stain (2000). The four books Goodbye,Columbus and Five Short Stories, Portnoy's Complaint, Ghost Writer, and Human Stainrepresented the four different periods respectively. This paper mainly analyzed the fourbooks.At first, this thesis elaborated the conflicts in the four books and the major conflict that pervaded Roth's stories. Then the author analyzed the principal characters in dilemma, and how they faced and jumped out of the dilemma. Through the analysis of the characters' differences and relations, the thesis studied the evolvement of Roth's...