Nathan Zuckerman's role in Philip Roth's American trilogy

This thesis examines Philip Roth’s American trilogy – American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain – with emphasis on the narrator/author, long-standing Roth character Nathan Zuckerman. I argue that the most fruitful reading of the trilogy is one that constantly keeps in mind that significant portions of the plot are imagined – or “authored” – by this familiar character. Such a reading is aware of how the American trilogy both “rewrites” the previous Zuckerman fictions, and turns the stories of the three novels’ respective protagonists, Seymour “Swede” Levov, Ira Ringold and Coleman Silk, into useful fictions through which Zuckerman can explore how the myth of America corresponds to the realities of postwar history. The thesis is divided into five chapters. In Chapter 1, I summarize the plot in each novel and make my case for a Zuckerman-centred reading. In Chapter 2, I map out who Zuckerman is and describe the transformation he has gone through when we encounter him in the American trilogy. In Chapter 3, I analyze the narrative strategy in each novel, and discuss the implications of the way Zuckerman explicitly brings the narrative process to our attention. In Chapter 4, I analyze thematically the decline of postwar America we are presented with in the trilogy. And in Chapter 5, I discuss the trilogy’s view of the human condition – what Zuckerman has learned in the narrative process