The Perils of Desire in Philip Roth’s Early Fiction

In her article The Perils of Desire in Roth\u27s Early Fiction Victoria Aarons posits that Philip Roth\u27s first collection of stories Goodbye, Columbus is the prototype for a host of characters who emerge throughout his oeuvre: characters who are engaged as the inveterate Nathan Zuckerman insists, in an exchange of existences abandoning willingly the artificial fiction of an inherent, essential self. From the stories in Goodbye, Columbus to the final novels comprising the Nemesis tetralogy, Roth\u27s characters perform a spectacle of selves engaged in the making of character. The making of character in Roth\u27s fiction appears in two ways: 1) the developing of protagonists who emerge throughout the trajectory of Roth\u27s extensive literary career and 2) each protagonist\u27s individual psychic project of making himself his own favorite character. For Roth, character is all about motive, those oppositional and ambivalent impulses which drive people to perform acts of desperate self-assertion, all part of the masquerade of self-reinvention