The Perils of Desire in Roth's Early Fiction

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In her article Perils of Desire in Roth's Early Fiction Victoria Aarons posits that Philip Roth's first collection of stories Goodbye, Columbus is prototype for a host of characters who emerge throughout his oeuvre: characters who are engaged as inveterate Nathan Zuckerman insists, in exchange of existences abandoning willingly the artificial of an inherent, essential self. From stories in Goodbye, Columbus to final novels comprising Nemesis tetralogy, Roth's characters perform a spectacle of selves engaged in making of character. The making of character in Roth's fiction appears in two ways: 1) developing of protagonists who emerge throughout trajectory of Roth's extensive literary career and 2) each protagonist's individual psychic project of making himself his own favorite character. For Roth, character is all about motive, those oppositional and ambivalent impulses which drive people to perform acts of desperate selfassertion, all part of masquerade of self-reinvention. Victoria Aarons, Perils of Desire in Roth's Early Fiction page 2 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.2 (2014): Thematic Issue History, Memory, and Making of Character in Roth's Fiction. Ed. Gustavo Sanchez-Canales and Victoria Aarons