Dancing With Chain

Philip Roth,known as the “Living Literary Legend” of the United States,devotes copious works to the world literature throughout his life and persists in writing even in his 70 s to 80 s.The Ghost Writer,regarded as a turning point of his writing technique from realism to postmodernism,is the first novel in Roth's Zuckerman Bound Trilogy.Therefore,it's narrative style becomes the study trends of Roth.Besides,due to Roth's Jewish identity and his works that concern the living state of survivors after the Holocaust,researchers also fix their attention on Roth's reconstruction for Jews' identity.Nevertheless,most people have ignored Roth's attentive concern for Jews' spiritual needs---freedom.Therefore,based on Sartre's Existential philosophy of Freedom,this thesis proves that freedom is a motif of The Ghost Writer and the inner voice of Jews,but such freedom is doomed to be relative resulting in the confinement of responsibility.By the way,analyzing the behavioral and psychological characteristics of the main characters in the process of self-pursuit by meticulously reading its text acts as the method to achieve that objective.This thesis consists of three parts.The introduction part briefly introduces Roth's personal experience and works,collects and summarizes the research status of The Ghost Writer and Zukerman Bound Trilogy at home and abroad.Finally,the significance and research design of this thesis are briefly explained.Four chapters constitute the body part.The first chapter analyzes four different life choices from the perspective of self-choice which is the core of Sartre's philosophy,specifically,the positive self-choice represented by Zuckerman and Amy,Lonoff's paradoxical freedom of choice,the conservative free self-choice represented by Zuckerman's father and the Judge,and the dedicatory self-choice represented by Hopes.Therefore,it demonstrates that freedom is a theme Roth presents in this novel;The second chapter discusses that although self-choice is absolutely free,the absolute freedom to do whatever you want does not exist,because people are always responsible to themselves,others and society,which attests that responsibility can form confinement to freedom.The third chapter,based on Sartre's later philosophy of relative freedom,discourses upon the relatively free road chosen by the characters after experiencing free choice and free responsibility when they face the conflict between ideal and reality,for example,Zuckerman's pursuit of the relative freedom of literary creation,Amy's pursuit of relative freedom of human rights and Lonoff's pursuit of the relative freedom of family ethics.The conclusion part holds a view that freedom presented by Philip Roth shows the characteristic that all kinds of freedom are just relatively free,which is consistent with Sartre's view on freedom.Relative freedom is the most ideal state when people encounter conflicts between ideal and reality,the characters in The Ghost Writer follow the rule,so do Jews and all human beings.