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
Famous quotes containing the word analysis:
“... the big courageous acts of life are those one never hears of and only suspects from having been through like experience. It takes real courage to do battle in the unspectacular task. We always listen for the applause of our co-workers. He is courageous who plods on, unlettered and unknown.... In the last analysis it is this courage, developing between man and his limitations, that brings success.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)
“Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)
“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)