Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Tibor Tóth: The Golden Cradle: Philip Roth's Revision of the Golden Bough Tradition

novel consists of a number of letters, replies to these letters and 'artmemories.' In My Life as a Man Philip Roth creates not one, but two characters who are artists and the effects of this 'affluence' are far from traditional. As I have already demonstrated the 'stories' of the novel discuss some relevant dilemmas regarding authority and freedom and undermine the traditional concept of the narrative T much in the fashion I identified in The Professor of Desire and The Breast. The narrative structure of My Life as a Man illustrates the nature of the process of fragmentation, which supports the mosaic-like, often chaotic material. My Life as a Man starts with a note to the reader announcing that the two stories in part one "Useful Fictions," and part two, the autobiographical narrative "My True Story," are drawn from the writings of Peter Tarnopol. The motto announces a discarded muse's reproach to the author: "I could be his Muse, if only he'd let me." This means that at least two narrators compete for authority over the fictional material we are reading. Part one Useful Fictions starts with a story entitled "Salad Days" which introduces Nathan Zuckerman a fictional novelist. Nathan Zuckerman writes a thirty-page paper entitled "Subdued Hysteria: A Study of the Undercurrent of Agony in Some Novels of Virginia Woolf." In this paper he contrasts the obscenities of the fictional reality he lives in with his taste for Virginia Woolf, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James, and his own interpretation of love based on To the Lighthouse

, Madame Bovary and The Amabassadors, respectively. The third person narrator accurately draws the biography of the young would-be artist. The material is interrupted by dialogues at intervals to produce a traditionally constructed fictional texture. "Salad Days" ends on a quite threatening tone but announces that the misfortunes of Nathan Zuckerman will be presented in another story. The second story included in Useful Fictions is "Courting Disaster (or, "Serious in the Fifties") which describes Zuckerman's journey to literary landmarks in Europe. This journey brings up 'Freudian orientation,' the transformation of Gregor Samsa, into a cockroach, 'epiphany,' in the context of his relationship to 'the design of a life or a book.' 131