A Reading of Philip Roth’s Everyman as a Postmodern Parody

Abstract

Philip Roth’s 2006 novel Everyman borrows its title from the famous fifteenth-century morality play The Summoning of Everyman. Yet, Roth establishes no clear or working connection between his novel and its medieval namesake. Roth scholars and critics have endeavored to identify intertextual continuities between these two works but with no tangible results. This article offers an alternative approach with which to view this problem by exploring the potential parodic nature of Roth’s text. More specifically, the paper theorizes that Roth fashioned a postmodernist brand of parody in his novel to negotiate the politics of representation of the issues of universality and determinism in the Medieval Everyman and the ideological discourses foregrounding their textual construction.