«ЛИЧНАЯ ДРАМА, ОПРЕДЕЛЕННАЯ ИСТОРИЕЙ»: ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННЫЙ МЕТОД Ф. РОТА В РОМАНЕ «АМЕРИКАНСКАЯ ПАСТОРАЛЬ»

Abstract

The article analyzes the implementation of Philip Roth’s (1933–2018) artistic method in the novel “American Pastoral”, which connects the historical events with a personal family drama and problematizes the Jewish identity in diaspora. The analysis shows that several key events from the history of the United States (the second half of the 20th century) were used as a conceptual basis for narrative structure and for the set of characters. World War II, the Vietnam War, which Roth had not previously discussed in a comprehensive manner, the 1967 Newark riots, and the Watergate scandal turn out to be not a panoramic background, but a dynamic force. References to the events help the narrator – Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s alter ego – form a non-linear plot: the large-scale events are to center each part of the novel and determine the nature of the period and the characters. The protagonist of the novel is Seymour “The Swede” Levov, an entrepreneur, a veteran of World War II, the embodiment of the American dream, symbolizing good old America during the times of economic growth. Seymour's pastoral life is destroyed by the inevitability of historical process that intrudes the family idyll: a terrorist attack committed by Seymour's daughter Meredith in support of the Vietnamese people “returns the war” to Lyndon Johnson and breaks the family ties. Attempts to find the root of evil retrospectively lead Seymour and Zuckerman to the idea of the cruelty of American history and the atomic nature of society. The ongoing dialogue between Jewish and American cultures is represented by the images of Seymour and Merry as both, individualized and collective images, actors of history who (re)shape the American dream.