.Narratives Strategy in Philip Roth's American Pastoral

Abstract

Roth presents American Pastoral, as the first volume of the American Trilogy, to be an extended meditation on the novelist’s consciousness and on storytelling as a means of simultaneously probing and respecting the mystery of private life and individual selfhood. Zuckerman as a novelist, function as narrator and author in American Pastoral engaged self-consciously in the production of fiction around Swede’s life, and Roth’s central aim is to investigate fiction-making in comparison to encountering real life and other people. Zuckerman’s novel may not provide the Swede’s life in detail but explains interpretational narratives of the competitive politics as fiction’s.  At the same time, it explores real life woven into story-telling and characterization as fiction. The storytelling is a way to probe and respect the mystery of private life and individual selfhood. In American Pastoral, struggles of the Swede to assimilate into mainstream, white American society with having proper genetic make-up and to marry within the tribe as a reality. Zuckerman’s fiction constructs characters, pursue their inner life, to perceive “the man within the man”.