A Study On Transgenerational Phantoms In Philip Roth’s American Pastoral

Philip Roth is one of the most productive and award-winning Jewish American writers whose literary works have attracted emphatic attention from the critical circle.American Pastoral,as the first installment of the "American Trilogy",distinguishes itself from Roth’s other works because it marks a shift of his focus to historical issues and their influence on American Jews.In American Pastoral,Roth relates a tragic story of the Levov family against the backdrop of Jewish racial history and American national history.By virtue of the theory on the transgenerational phantom,this paper intends to explore the historical roots of the phantom of the Jewish dilemma,its haunting influence on different generations of Jewish immigrants in the Levov family.It also attempts to implicate Roth’s profound contemplation on the relation between individual and history.Revolving around the topic of the transgenerational phantom,the paper probes into American from the following three aspects.The first chapter makes a thorough inquiry into Jewish and Irish racial history before and after they immigrate to America and American national history after WWII in the novel to point out that it is the first-generation immigrants’ inassimilable experience of racial discrimination and persecution that brings forth the phantom of inassimilable trauma between maintaining and separating from Jewishness.The phantom of inassimilable trauma is unwittingly transmitted to their post-immigrant descendants and exacerbates due to their conflict situation in WWII and social unrest in American society since the 1960s.The second chapter conducts a detailed exploration of the phantom’s presence on each generation in the Levov family and clarifies the racial and familial reasons for Merry’s seemingly mutative behaviors in her family.The transgenerational phantom haunts each generation of the Levov family.As the first generation of post-immigrants,Lou has struggled between maintaining Jewishness in his family and separating from it by regulating his behavior based on the WASP world’s standard.His son,the Swede,suffers from internal psychic splitting who lives a double life between immersion in his imaginatively scrambled American illusion and his illusion of true feelings.The phantom haunts Merry with the symptom of innate aphasia and vagrant mental status and makes her subject to the influence of different religions and cultures.Her radical involvement in political activities is the typical symptom of the haunting phantomWith the help of Wayne Booth’s perspectives on the implied author,the third chapter excavates Roth’s deep concern about the living condition of American Jews and his attitude towards Jewish racial history and American national history.He satirizes the blind and innocent American illusions of the protagonists through his careful design of the plots and deploying obvious paradoxes in Zuckerman’s narration.In the meanwhile,Roth stresses the significance for American Jews to face up the history by building up close connections between the vicissitude of individual and historical events in the development of the novel.Through the study of American Pastoral from the perspective of the transgenerational phantom,this thesis avers that Philip Roth reveals the causes of the phantom of inassimilable trauma that has haunted American Jews by disclosing their painful history before and after their immigration.He also relates the presence of the phantom in the Levov family to display his profound emphasis on the importance of history and his deep concern about the living status of Jewish Americans.