Novelist-Narrators of the American Dream: The (Meta-)Realistic Chronicles of Cather, Fitzgerald, Roth, and Díaz

Abstract

Halfway through chapter 3 of Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997), its novelist-narrator Skip Zuckerman transitions abruptly but crucially away from the first-person voice in which he has narrated the first two and a half chapters and into the third-person limited omniscient perspective from which the remaining six and a half chapters will be written. Zuckerman has, at earlier moments in the chapter, alluded to the novel he would (im- mediately after the 1995 events being described) write about the character of Seymour Swede Levov on whom Roth's book has focused from its first words, but here the shift from meta-fiction to the fiction itself is much more complete and striking, and one that Zuckerman accomplishes in a single five-word sentence: I dreamed a realistic chronicle. The next, much lon- ger sentence opens with I began gazing into his life, and then shifts fully into that third-person limited omniscient representation of the Swede's perspective (as imagined by Zuckerman) which will comprise the whole of that chronicle, that novel within the novel. In fact, when Zuckerman writes in that same sentence I found him in Deal, New Jersey, it marks the last time in Roth's book—which will continue for over three hundred thirty pages—that he uses the first-person pronoun or refers to himself and his role as novelist-narrator in any explicit way. 1