A Study Of The Theme Of Alienation In American Pastoral

Philip Roth is one of the most outstanding American Jewish writers in succession to Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud in the contemporary American literature. American Pastoral, one of Roth's later works, has been acclaimed by some critics as a novel with the most in-depth thinking among all his works.As a third generation Jewish writer living in America, Roth depicts the alienation of Jewish identity, family relations and Jewish traditional belief of the Levovs in American Pastoral, and demonstrates the existing state and religious belief crisis of the three generations of the Jewish family in the context of American mainstream culture. According to Sartre's Existentialist Philosophy, alienation is a kind of existing state of the modern people living in the West, therefore, the author of this thesis attempts to study the theme of alienation as revealed in American Pastoral by employing the theory of alienation in Sartre's Existentialist philosophy.The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter makes a brief introduction to the historical background of the Jews' alienation and the present situation of the American Jews' alienation, and points out the phenomenon of alienation as depicted by Roth in his works. The second chapter mainly analyzes in detail how the Levovs' Jewish identities are alienated in the context of the American mainstream culture, In this chapter, the author also analyzes the inevitability of the alienation of their Jewish identity. The third and the last chapter aim at exploring separately the alienation of the family relations and the religious beliefs of the Levovs in the context of American mainstream culture, and the author of this thesis holds that their deviation from their traditional moral standard explains for the alienation of the family relations and their religious beliefs of the Levovs, except the influence from the American mainstream culture. By the detailed analysis of the theme of alienation in American Pastoral, this thesis attempts to demonstrate Roth's deep concern for the living conditions of the American Jews, and to prove the profound impact of both the Jewish traditional culture and the American culture on Roth's literary writings. It is hoped that the cultural interpretation of the theme of alienation as revealed in Roth's American Pastoral will be helpful to the domestic study on Roth's later works.