From the Superficial to the Jamesian (Part Six of Six)

If, then, the Swede may be considered guilty of self-deception, the "American bezerk" that descends upon him can be seen as a manifestation of the "blindness to reality [i.e., the bad faith], which puts him at the mercy of perverse and inner destructive forces" (Rodgers, 49). By calling forth these forces, through his devastating depiction of the protagonist, Zuckerman at last succeeds in venting his ressentiment against him. Indeed, one might say that the narrator symbolically overcomes his impotence and screws the Swede over, just as Neil screws Brenda. In so doing, both narrators demonstrate their ignorance towards those they resent; one by refusing to look beneath the surface, the other by refusing to do so honestly.

This is assuming, of course, that a fictional character, like Zuckerman, can even be accused of dishonesty. By spending four hundred pages to "tell someone else" - i.e., the reader - his conjectures about a man he barely knew, Zuckerman challenges the boundaries of realism in literature and answers, in the affirmative, his own Jamesian question:

Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? (35).

Here, Zuckerman once again admits to having "mangle[d]" his analysis of the Swede while the latter was alive. He asserts, moreover, that his fictionalized portrayal of the protagonist is actually closer to the truth. But is there any truth to begin with? Given that the narrator is operating within the context of a novel, his allegation seems somewhat absurd. After all, there never was a "real" Swede in the first place. Indeed, Zuckerman manages to create an imaginary existence for one who never existed.

By subtly shifting his narrative focus from the one sphere of illusion to another - an alternate fiction within a fiction - the author leads his readers to be doubly deceived. Moreover, he causes his initial sphere of fiction to seem more real, relative to his second. In this way, Roth approaches a level of complexity and believability with his "word people" which far exceeds the standard set in Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go; one which, indeed, rivals that of James.

WORKS CITED

Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Henry James. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. 1987.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Philip Roth . New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

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