Philip Roth's
American Pastoral (1997) is steeped in the same subjective brand of voyeurism as his 1959 novella,
Goodbye Columbus. Both works unfold from the perspectives of highly conspicuous and biased narrators. Neil Klugman and Nathan Zuckerman focus on the lives of other characters, whom they admire as well as envy. Their feelings towards these antagonists assume different manifestations; indeed, one is overtly superficial, while the other is more penetrating, multi-layered and Jamesian. Ultimately, however, each narrator is guilty of "resentment," the quality defined by the existentialist critic Max Scheler as "a smoldering, suppressed wrath permeated with self-deception" (Martin, 88).
In
Goodbye Columbus, Neil's resentment of Brenda Patimkin is readily apparent. As a lower-middle class Jew from Newark, New Jersey, he is angered by his girlfriend's careless display of affluence. Indeed, when she casually talks about having plastic surgery on her nose, his response is, in her view, "nasty" (Roth, 14). Neil's nastiness persists throughout the story, directing itself not only at Brenda, but also at her "disastrously polite" mother (21), her bratty little sister, and other members of the Jewish nouveau-riche, such as the "little bastards from Montclair who come down to the library during weekends, hinting all the while at 'Boston' and 'New Haven'" (11). However, even after Brenda asks Neil "why [he is] so nasty all the time" he denies that it is his intent to be so. In this way, he suppresses his anger, giving in to a form of self-deception, which prevents him from acknowledging his true feelings for Brenda. Neil fails to recognize that she embodies the sort of wanton materialism which, in a show of defensiveness, he professes to despise, but secretly covets.
Moreover, by convincing himself that he is in love with Brenda -- "I love you, I do," he tells her, even after admitting that "[he] did not have the feelings [he] said [he] had until after [he] spoke them" (29) -- Neil blinds himself to the fact that all he desires is her flesh and her recently acquired pedigree. Indeed, as noted by the critic Bernard F. Rodgers, Jr., Brenda exists for him only as a "projection of his own desires and fears" (Rodgers, 39). This becomes evident once he fails to counter the assertion, raised by Brenda's uncle Leo, that he is a "smart boy" who "knows a good deal when he sees one" (117). By further telling himself not "to louse things up," Leo unmasks Neil's insecurities regarding Brenda, which have everything to do with her family's status and nothing whatsoever to do with whether the two of them actually love one another. However, Neil does not allow this revelation of his own moral shallowness to penetrate his psyche. Rather, he remains self-deceived to the end, professing that "it will be a long time before he made love to anyone the way [he] made love to [Brenda]," as if he has ever loved, or even really known, her to begin with (136).
