Historical Writing In Philip Roth’s American Pastoral

Philip Roth is a great contemporary master of fiction. During his fifty years of literary career, Roth has published many enduring fictions and earned numerous awards. Themes of Roth are always various and he turns toward social issues and discusses how history influences ordinary people’s lives in his American trilogy, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. The three novels cover the historical period from the notorious McCarthyism of the1950s to Clinton’s sexual scandal in1998. American Pastoral is the first fiction of the trilogy and it is also Roth’s debut work focusing on historical issues. Mainly taking the turbulent1960s as the novel’s background, Roth relates the rise and fall of a Jewish family the Levovs by the narration of his alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman. Indeed, in addition to the apparent national history, there exist two more dimensions of history in American Pastoral, the family history of the Levovs in America and the racial history of the Jewish and Irish people. In order to illustrate the tragedy of the Levovs’from the perspective of historical writing comprehensively, the thesis intends to probe into these three dimensions of history respectively.The main body of the paper falls into three parts. The first chapter focuses on the family saga of the Levovs and analyzes the four generations’experiences in the United States. They become more and more successful in their business but farther and farther away from their ethnic culture. The middle generation succeeds in getting into the American mainstream but at the cost of losing their Jewishness. The problems finally break out in the new generation, whose deeds bring a huge and irreparable damage to the family.The argumentation in the second chapter focuses on the racial history of the Jewish and the Irish, and the Levovs’representation of and reactions to the traumatic memories, pointing out that traumas and biases they have experienced are the external causes leading to the Levovs’tragedy. Both the two races have experienced quite a few traumas before and after their migration to America. The traumas are transformed into collective memories influencing themselves and their later generations, and these traumatic memories are represented by their senses of inferiority to and contempt for the mainstream whites. Furthermore, the section probes into other forms of representation, like Jewish immigrants’ anxieties of wars and Irish people’s strong attachment to Catholicism, wealth, and land. Influenced by all these external factors, the family’s aspiration is ruined by Merry’s disastrous bomb and they all fail to seek recovery from this traumatic event.Chapter three carries a discussion about how the national history of the1960s destroys numerous American families and puts individuals in despair. The1960s is an age of riots, violence, protests, and radical movements. The families are greatly influenced by the anti-Vietnam war movement, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement and the counterculture movement. Against this backdrop, the relationships among family members are more and more distanced and alienated. It is impossible for them to have mutual understanding and effective communication again. At last Merry, a representative, destroyed their family to release her repression, spoiling the whole endeavors of the previous three generations. The same is true of other families.The thesis has thoroughly discussed the above three dimensions of history in the novel. Though all of these three dimensions serve different functions for the tragedy of the Levovs, they intermingle with each other and lead to the disillusionment of the Levovs. However, when probing into this novel through the perspective of history, previous studies failed to take into account the family and racial histories. Indeed, the novel can be interpreted more thoroughly by considering these three dimensions together. More importantly, the sufferings of the Levovs are a miniature of thousands of American middle class families in the1960s. Their tragedies signify the non-existent pastoral life in America. The text is a parody to pastoral life, for pastoral has already become an ideal which can never be attained to. This may at least partly explain why Philip Roth satirically named this novel "American Pastoral."...