Analysis
By creating parallels between Zuckerman's life as a novelist (with the novel Carnovsky a stand-in for his Portnoy's Complaint) to his own, Roth expressed his interest in the relationship between an author and his work. Roth mined such meta-fictional concerns more deeply in his series of novels published in the 1980s, most radically in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock.
By the mid-1990s, though, Roth tamped down on the self-referentiality. He reintroduced Zuckerman as witness and narrator in a trilogy of historical novels: American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000), set in the period from the 1960s into the 1990s. The Indian author, Salman Rushdie, used Zuckerman as a character in his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), where in an alternate universe, it is the literary alter-egos (and their novels) that are real.
Read more about this topic: Nathan Zuckerman
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