138 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
demonstrated below) overtly fabricates and embellishes the details
of the plot. These techniques remind the reader that there is no sin-
gle, all-encompassing narrative that can neatly account for human
existence but, rather, that there are only interpretations and guesses,
most of which will undoubtedly be incorrect. As Zuckerman com-
ments in American Pastoral , an unavoidable fact of human interac-
tion is that in dealing with people, “you [inevitably] get them wrong
before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you
get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to
tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong
again.”^36 For Royal, the narrative’s epistemological uncertainty is of
additional importance because it conjoins the creative process of sto-
rytelling with the creative act involved in one of the work’s central
themes: “the constructed nature of identity.”^37 Royal’s argument is
useful to the current discussion because it presents narrative form as
being instrumental in establishing Roth’s critique of static identity.
This is a critique that holds identity to be a process that is unstable,
contingent, and ultimately outside the parameters of rigid defini-
tion. I also contend that the key method by which Roth promotes
this critical vision is a provocative silence that is deployed within a
modified version of the classical Greek form.
Indeed, for Bonnie Lyons, all three novels in the American Trilogy
represent “great American tragedies” in that they all “depict heroes
whose fates are intricately enmeshed in their specifically American
settings and times.”^38 Lyons argues that, like Silk, Levov in American
Pastoral exhibits a tragic flaw that conspicuously contributes to his
downfall. Unlike Silk, however, this hamartia of the character can
be attributed to the postwar American culture at large, which is “a
dream world” of patriotic optimism.^39 In contrast, Silk’s life, for
Lyons, traces a different tragic trajectory in that he is a “hero” who
attempts to go against the prevailing American narrative, thereby
triggering his own ruin.^40 The tragic mode that frames Silk’s life
is immediately advertised in the book’s epigraph: an excerpt from
Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. However, there are also numerous
other moments in the narrative that conspicuously attempt to enfold
Silk’s actions and psyche within the classical Greek tragic frame.
For instance, when Zuckerman recalls a visit he made with Silk to