Fact, Fiction, and History in Philip Roth's "Eli, the Fanatic"

Abstract

This essay uncovers the factual and historical foundation for the dramatic situation in Philip Roth’s short story “Eli, the Fanatic” (1959) and explores Roth’s manipulation of that historical foundation as he constructs the fictional world of his story. Roth’s use of historical facts in this early story is all the more interesting given that, over the course of his long and prolific career, Roth has grown increasingly and more explicitly preoccupied with the ambiguous boundary between fact and fiction. With the creation of his fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, who first appeared as a primary character in The Ghost Writer (1979), Roth aroused readers’ curiosity about the border between autobiographical fact and fiction—a curiosity he subsequently complicated and exploited in works featuring a protagonist and first-person narrator named “Philip Roth” (such as Deception [1990], Operation Shylock [1993], and the alternative history The Plot against America [2004]). In these novels, Roth creates implicit meta-narratives in which the factual and the imaginary are each ironized in relation to the other. Operation Shylock begins with the author’s prefatory claim for the veracity of the narrative: “For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book. These are minor changes that . . . are of little significance to the overall story and its verisimilitude” (13). This disclaimer—a throwback to the eighteenthand nineteenth-century convention of novelists insisting on the authenticity of the subsequent narrative—is then given a postmodern twist in Roth’s postscript “Note to the Reader,” in which he now confesses, “This book is a work of fiction” and concludes with the final ambiguous statement, “This confession is false” (399). Which confession? The one comprising the body of the novel or the final “confession” he has just made, that the “book is a work of fiction”? The ambiguity is, of course, Roth’s postmodern joke, which he doggedly perpetuated in promoting the novel. Yet the seeds of the later Roth’s overt, postmodernist play with fact and fiction can be found in the covert manipulation of historical fact in his early story “Eli, the Fanatic.”