904 Roth, Philip
thoughts with which she concludes the text collapse
temporal boundaries and permit the irruption of the
past into the present. This slippage between dream
and memory, between past, present, and future,
works to make the reliability of Antoinette’s nar-
rative tenuous and thereby underscores Rochester’s
view of her as mad.
Wide Sargasso Sea is concerned not only with
individual memory but with cultural memorializing
and colonial history. For example, the custom of
acknowledging the “bastard” children born to slave
women and English men is described as an “old cus-
tom . . . better dead and buried,” and old Mr. Cosway
calls his own son “what’s your name:” “I can’t
remember all their names—it’s too much to expect
of me.” Secrecy also shrouds some cultural activities;
as when Antoinette tells herself she has forgotten
witnessing Christophine practicing obeah. However,
Rhys makes clear the importance of remembering
the past in the face of its suppression. She reminds
us that although one may try to forget, memory
remains; the town Massacre retains its name and its
history, despite Antoinette’s insistence that “Nobody
remembers now.” History is not easily erased, Wide
Sargasso Sea suggests: Indeed, it is memory that
shapes the narrative at every turn.
Jessica Gildersleeve
roTH, PHiLiP American Pastoral
(1997)
Philip Roth’s 1997 novel American Pastoral exam-
ines the value of the American dream against the
backdrop of the post–World War II climate in the
suburbs of New Jersey as well as the Vietnam era of
the 1960s and 1970s. In so doing, the novel tracks
the American experience spanning two generations,
starting with Seymour “The Swede” Levov—a fair-
haired, Jewish high school athlete in Weequahic,
New Jersey, who embodies the Jewish community’s
postwar hopes and dreams—and ending with his
daughter, Merry Levov, the stuttering child who
blows up the community’s post office as an attempt
to protest the Vietnam War. In telling—and, at
times, imagining—the story of the Swede, the
novel’s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, must neces-
sarily come to terms with his own sense of America
as well as the hope that he, too, has invested in the
family of the Swede.
Aimee PozorskiIdentIty in American Pastoral
As with many novels by Philip Roth, American
Pastoral focuses on the perceived identity of a com-
munity of Jews living in New Jersey. But also, as the
first novel in what is now referred to as the “Ameri-
can Trilogy,” American Pastoral is a novel about our
identity as Americans during the Vietnam era, and
the identity of the United States itself.
The novel begins with a two-word fragment:
“The Swede.” Itself an identity marker, the frag-
ment effectively introduces the reader to the story’s
main character: Seymour Irving “The Swede” Levov.
However, the phrase is misleading in all of its irony.
Levov, of course, is not Swedish at all. He just looks
Swedish—which is, in part, why everyone loves him.
In fact, he is an American Jew who grew up in New-
ark, New Jersey, during World War II and who sees
his personal fortune disintegrate during the 1960s
and 1970s after his daughter blows up the post office
to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
At first glance, it appears as though Levov’s
identity has been imposed on him from the out-
side—from his peers at Rimrock High who named
him the Swede, celebrating “the steep-jawed, insen-
tient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond” and his
athletic prowess in order to forget, as the narrator
explains, the “war against the Germans and the
Japanese.” The fears related to World War II in this
case, as well as the desire to forget the war, were
not related simply to racial identity or profiling,
but rather to human vulnerability: sons, brothers,
and husbands were getting killed in the war, but
the Swede, on the other hand, appears to possess “a
bizarre, delusionary kind of sustenance.”
Such a sustenance, coupled with his physical
prowess and temperamental grit, allows him to suc-
ceed, by “American” standards, during the years after
the war. He marries a Christian beauty queen, buys
a beautiful home in a prestigious neighborhood in
New Jersey, and runs a thriving glove business that
he took over from his father. In other words, he lives
out—in many ways—the fantasy of his boyhood
friends. He clearly has “made it” in these terms,