Philip Roth- Master of the Double Identity
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Philip Roth – Master of the “Double Identity” because he suffers from one
What influences ones identity? Is it their homes, their parents,
their religion, or maybe where they live? When do they get one? Do they get
it when they understand right from wrong, or when they can read, or are
they born with it? Everyone has one and each identity is unique, or is it?
In literature, (or life) religion plays a large role in a characters identity. However, sometimes the writers own religion and personal experiences shapes the characters identity more than his/her imagination does. A persons religion can play a big role in ones identity. Throughout his works, Philip Roth explores the theme of identity doubles. Roths portrayal of identity formation in his characters is directly inspired by his own identity; his life.
One of the most obvious examples of Roths art imitating life is in two of his books naming the main characters after none other than himself. It was among some of the many startling gestures in his career; in Deception (1990) he
referred to the main character as Philip and in Operation Shylock (1993) he made reference to the main character as Philip Roth. In her article titled, “Philip Roths Fictions of Self Exposure”, Debra Shostak remarks how odd it is for an author to outwardly make reference to themselves when most authors want avoid any personal association with their work other than writing it, she further points out that Roth intentionally writes this way, making his career out of his readers inclinations toward “biographical interpretations”:
Few writers dare to name themselves at the center of their inventions,
which is why it is so arresting to find a work of fiction that pronounces
its authors name within the text. Because readers are frequently tempted,
from either prurient interest or more impartial motives, to discern autobiography
in a fictional narrative, most writers of fiction seem to labor out of modesty
, a sense of privacy, or a display of imaginative capacities to erase the traces
of their own lives from their work. Not so Philip Roth. Especially since his invention
of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth has encouraged readers to interpret the narrative voice
of his fiction as a self-revealing “I,” a Roth surrogate who, by the time of Deception
and Operation Shylock, is no longer a surrogate but is “Roth” himselfÐ What I argue here is not that Roth is, strictly, writing autobiographically, but rather that he makes capital out of his readers inclinations toward biographical interpretations of his work. The “Roth” in the text must always be read in quotation marks, even when seemingly most unmediated, in order to underscore the indeterminacy of the “Roth” who appears in each narrative and to distinguish this narrativized “Roth” from the man who writes the books and lives in Connecticut – a distinction the texts labor to obscure.
On the last page of Philip Roths memoir Patrimony (1991), he tells of a terrifying dream that came in the weeks following the burial of his father, an assimilated secular Jew who had never expressed any particular inclination toward faith. Responding to the morticians request that he choose a suit for the burial, he inexplicably acted on a religious impulse to bury his father in an old prayer shawl. In the dream, Herman Roth appeared to resentfully criticize his sons choice:
One night some six weeks later, at around 4:00 A.M., he came in a
hooded white shroud to reproach me. He said, “I should have been
dressed in a suit. You did the wrong thing.” I awakened screaming.
All that peered out from the shroud was the displeasure in his dead
face. And his words were a rebuke: I had dressed him for eternity in the
wrong clothes. (237)
Though Roth has often disputed claims that his fictional
representations of familial conflict are in any way autobiographical,
passages such as this recollection of a juvenile nightmare suggest
that the novelist has long been interested in the creative fallout from
anxieties about his relation to the secular legacy of his parents
generation, privately and publicly. Later, in Sabbaths Theater (1995), he had the title character emerge from the funeral of his closest friend to say remorsefully that “its putting corpses into clothes that really betrays what great thinkers we
are” (413). The intensely psychological problem of dressing his dead father “for eternity in the wrong clothes,” hints toward a textual correspondence with his
Indecisive representations