Philip Roth's Confessional Narrators: the Growth of Consciousness

Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1979 Philip Roth's Confessional Narrators: The Growth of Consciousness. Alexander George Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation George, Alexander, "Philip Roth's Confessional Narrators: The Growth of Consciousness." (1979). Dissertations. 1823. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1823 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1979 Alexander George PHILIP ROTH'S CONFESSIONAL NARRATORS: THE GROWTH OF' CONSCIOUSNESS by Alexander George A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 1979 ACKNOWLEDGE~£NTS It is a singular pleasure to acknowledge the many debts of gratitude incurred in the writing of this dissertation. My warmest thanks go to my Director, Dr. Thomas Gorman, not only for his wise counsel and practical guidance, but espec~ally for his steadfast encouragement. I am also deeply indebted to Dr. Paul Messbarger for his careful reading and helpful criticism of each chapter as it was written. Thanks also must go to Father Gene Phillips, S.J., for the benefit of his time and consideration. I am also deeply grateful for the all-important moral support given me by my family and friends, especially Dr. Milutin Savic, Tern Vassos, Michael Raimondi, and Thomas Mann. Finally, I must record my heartfelt thanks to Philis, without whose love and active support an already arduous task.would have seemed impossible. ii VITA Alexander George is the son of Bozidar (Djordjevich) George and Ivana (Gabersek) George. He was born 28 August 1947, in Voerde, West Germany. After graduating from Amundsen High School (Chicago) in 1965, he attended Loyola University of Chicago, where he received his B.A. in English in February, 1970. He began graduate work at· Loyola University in September, 1970; 1n June, 1972, he received the M.A. in English. As a doctoral student at Loyola University, Mr. George was awarded a National Defense Education Act Title IV Fellowship (1972-73) , a teaching assistantship (197)-74) , and an instructorship (1975-76). He served as chairperson of the English Graduate Club (1974-75), and in May, 1976 was accepted into Alpha Sigma Nu (National Jesuit Honor Society) . Mr. George is currently a lecturer at Loyola University and an instructor in the English Department at Marmion Military Academy (Aurora, Illinois). iii r TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . .. ii LIFE . iii Chapter I. THE OPEN DECISION . 1 II. THE CLOSED DECISION 51 III. STAGE ONE: LETTING GO . .• . , 87 IV. STAGE TWO: PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT . 126 v. STAGE THREE: THE BREAST AND THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE . , 164 VI. STAGE FOUR: MY LIFE AS A MAN 205 REFERENCES . 246 iv CHAPTER I THE OPEN DECISION "You must change your life." David Kepesh's acceptance and promulgation of this admonition from Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" closes not only The Breast, but a significant stage in the development of Philip Roth's fiction. In a self-interview, Roth insightfully and precisely adumbrates the artistic evolution which Kepesh concludes. The question of moral sovereignty, as it is examined in Letting Go, Portnoy's Complaint, and The Breast, 1s really a question of the kind of commandment the hero of each book will issue to himself; here the skepticism is directed inward, upon the hero's ambiguous sense of personal im peratives and taboos. I can even think of these characters - Gabe Wallach, Alexander Portnoy and David Kepesh - as three stages of a single explosive projectile that is fired into the barrier that forms one boundary of the individual's identity and ex perience: that barrier of personal inhibition, ethical conviction and plain, old monumental fear beyond which lies the moral and psychological un known. Gabe Wallach crashes up against the wall and collapses; Portnoy proceeds on through the 1 2 fractured mortar, only to become lodged there, half in, half out. It remains for Kepesh to pass right on through the bloody hole, and out the other end, into no-man's land.l The barrier which Roth describes is a barrier of consciousness. It is the contention of this study that the controlling principle or logic underlying Roth's artistic development is to be found in the organic growth of consciousness evidenced in his confessional narrators. Furthermore, I equate Roth's barrier of consciousness with J. H. Bryant's "open decision," 2 the recognition that the essence of the human condition is chaos, ambiguity, and uncertainty; this recognition involves the liberation from a limited viewpoint finally achieved by the third stage of Roth's projectile--David Kepesh. I believe the validity of this approach to be borne out with Roth's subsequent creation of a fourth stage, Peter Tarnopol, in the ironically titled ~ Life as ~ Man. A reflexive lphilip Roth, "On The Great American Novel," Reading Myself and Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), ~85. Additional references to this valuable collection of essays and interviews will take the following form. After the citation of a particular essay or article, Reading Myself and Others will be abbreviated RMO, followed by the pagination. 2Jerry H. Bryant, The Open Decision: The Con temporary American Novel and its Intellectual BaCkground (New York: Free Press, 1970)-.--Additional references to this work will be found in parentheses after each citation from it in the text; The Open Decision will be abbreviated TOD. --- ---- 3 novel (that is, one in which the narrator himself is a writer producing his own fictions), it brilliantly reflects in its very structure the acceptance of ambiguity which is the heart of the "open decision." From the beginning of Roth's literary career, he has been concerned with moral problems. In one of his germinal essays, "Writing About Jews," Roth argues that from the standpoint of both author and audience, the exploration and expansion of moral experience is a primary function and value of fiction. Furthermore, he defines the proper perspective that an audience should have when dealing with literary "realities" beyond its normal ken. Fiction is not written to affirm the principles and beliefs that everybody seems to hold, nor does it seek to guarantee the appropriateness of our feelings. The world of fiction, in fact, frees us from the circumscriptions that society places upon feeling; one of the greatnesses of the art is that it allows both the writer and the reader to respond to experience in ways not always available in day to-day conduct; or, if they are available, they are not possible, or manageable, or legal, or advisable, or even necessary to the business of living. We may not even know that we have such a range of feelings and responses until we have contact with the work of fiction. This does not mean that either reader or writer no longer brings any judgment to bear upon human action .. Rather, we judge at a different level of our being, for not only are we judging with the aid of new feelings but without the necessity of having to act upon judgment. Ceasing for a while to be upright citizens, we drop into another layer of consciousness. And this expansion of moral ·, 4 consciousness, this exploration of moral fantasy, is of considerable value to a man and to society. 3 The writer, of course, utilizes his characters as the vehicles for his exploration. With an extremely apt metaphor, Roth has characterized his protagonists as "men and women whose moorings have been cut, and who are swept away from their native shores and out to sea." 4 In short, "all are living beyond their psychological means; it isn't a matter of sinking or swimming--they have, as it were, to invent the crawl."5 While swimming in their respective seas, Roth's confessional narrators struggle for a moral certainty impossible to attain. Gabe Wallach, Alexander Portnoy, David Kepesh, and Peter Tarnopol, respectively narrators of Goodbye, Columbus, Letting Go, Portnoy's Complaint, The Breast (and The Professor of Desire), and My Life As ~Man, are all studies in disintegration, men deeply alienated and isolated, full of guilt, yet struggling for wholeness. Since the narrators are as they are, conflict characterizes all relationships--professional, familial, or romantic. 3 "Writing About Jews , " RMO, p. 151. 4 "On The Breast," RMO, p. 65. 5 rbid., pp. 65-66. 5 For the most part, colleagues are charlatans, relatives are oppressors, and women are either Madonnas or whores, both ultimately emasculators. The isolation of these protagonists is made concrete most grotesquely in the Kafkan transformation of David Kepesh into a breast. Paradoxically, the struggle for moral certainty concludes with Kepesh's final acceptance of uncertainty and arnbi- guity as part of the given of human existence. Indeed, it is precisely this perspective which constitutes the fundamental core of J.H. Bryant's "open decision." Drawing upon evidence from physics, philosophy, sociology, and psychology, Bryant posits a contemporary intellectual milieu dominated by a relativistic perception of reality which "forms the foundation of contemporary morality." (TOD, p. 4) Moreover, the novels he considers "examine that foundation and dramatize the dilemmas of that morality." {TOD, p. 4) Borrowing and expanding upon the meaning of a phrase coined by Max Scheler, the twentieth century phenomenologist, Bryant delineates the following as fundamental to the "open decision." Its main assumption is that reality lies in the individual thing--the process of the actual entity.

Load more