| Reputed for his witty humor, playful satire, unique style and rich materials, Philip Roth is one of the greatest writers that constitute the vanguard of the American Jewish literature. Though his debut Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy's Complaint (1969) had once aroused tremendous controversy for taking Jewish materials and revealing the darkness and ugliness of Jews, the great awards entitled and prolific works produced convince readers of Philip Roth as a dedicated contributor to American Jewish literature. Among his many literary productions, The Counterlife is one novel exploring the cause of the crisis of Jewish identity, Jewish culture, and the relationship between life and art.The Counterlife, written during the 1980s, paves the way from Zuckerman Trilogy to Philip Roth Trilogy and is an experimental novel in which the author makes bold variation not only in respect of writing style, structural organization, characterization but themes as well. Roth had once claimed that he was not a Jewish writer but a writer of Jewish origin in the 1970s, during which almost all of the Philip Roth works are demonstration of assimilated American Jewish immigrants'rebellion against or alienation from (or evasion) their Jewish identity and authentic tradition. However, since the very novel The Counterlife, Roth has expanded his meditation to Jewish identity and Jewish problems during the post-alienation period such as the attitudes of different Jews towards Jewish identity, the divergence between American Jews and Israeli Jews, and conflict between Jews and Gentiles etc.. Except for the innovation in themes, the author combines autobiography, story-within-story, imagination and non-traditional narrative strategies so as to leave readers broader space for imagination and meditation on deeper themes. The unreasonable structure and ambiguous plots of this novel are obstacles for reading and analysis; however, analyzing this transitional work is conducive to the study of Philip Roth on a whole, worthy for the study of Jewish themes in American Jewish literature and complementary to the study of Philip Roth and American Jewish literature in Chinese literary academy.Based on close textual analysis, this dissertation discusses how the author demonstrates Jewish themes through counter-plots and non-traditional narrative strategies in terms of culture and society. It is divided into an introduction, a main body, which includes three chapters, and a conclusion. Chapter One deals with the novel's counter-plots and understanding of the themes and motivation in this novel. Chapter Two makes an analysis of the novel's setting and arrangement as well as diversified Jewish identities of various Jewish characters from cultural and social perspectives. And in Chapter Three, some of the narrative strategies and writing techniques such as repetition, ambiguity, irony and symbolism are discussed to further confirm the novel's themes and motivation. In the conclusion of this dissertation, a summary of the previous analysis would be done and the value and questions which may be valuable yet undiscussed in this discussion will be pointed out at the end for later study. |
