It has long been assumed by many that Nathan Zuckerman is merely a version of Philip Roth, and many critics have echoed Gordon in their assessments of the trilogy. Michiko Kakutani saw the trilogy as an abandonment of Roth’s “long obsession with alter egos and mirror games,” his “narcissistic pyrotechnics,” and a move beyond “the solipsistic presentations of self he had been practicing for years to create a capacious chronicle of American innocence and disillusion” (“Postwar Paradise” C11;“Confronting the Failures” E1).
Perhaps most significantly, though, one of the central concerns of the “American Trilogy” is the interaction between self and society, between the individual and his community, between self-determination and social determination,…show more content… What was supposed to be hard and somehow shaming or destructive was not only easy but without consequences, no price paid at all”, but in the wake of his dismissal from Athena, erupting with rage at his unhelpful lawyer, Coleman shouts, “I never again want to hear that self-admiring voice of yours or see your smug fucking lily-white face” (HS 81). It follows that Coleman’s use of the outdated racist terminology “spooks” to refer to two absent students who later turn out to be black—the utterance that sets in motion his tragic fall—may be more than a cruelly ironic fate. It may be, as both Brauner and Mark Shechner suggest, the return of the repressed, the socially determined self returning with a vengeance (Philip Roth 159; Up Society’s Ass…show more content… In Zuckerman’s imagining of Coleman’s story (as well as the stories of the Swede and Ira), this particularly American tragedy follows from the pursuit of this impossible ideal. To live outside of history, to be without parents, children, colleagues—to be without entanglement with other people—is a pure distillation of the oft-represented American dream of innocence and individuality, and, in Zuckerman’s estimation, it is a dream of not living in the world at all. Being in the world in any real way involves membership in at least some communities, and therefore necessitates subjection to the claims of those
