Character
Roth first created the character of Zuckerman in the novel My Life As a Man (1974), where he is the "product" of another fictional Roth figure, the writer Peter Tarnopol (making Zuckerman, in his original form, an "alter-alter-ego"). In later books, Roth uses Zuckerman as a protagonist, starting with the 1979 novel The Ghost Writer, where he is a writing apprentice on a pilgrimage to cull the wisdom of the reclusive author E. I. Lonoff. In Zuckerman Unbound (1981), he has become established as a novelist and must deal with the fall-out from his ribald comedic novel Carnovsky. Though wildly successful, the novel has brought to Zuckerman unwanted attention from both readers and his family, who object to their portrayal in his work.
Read more about this topic: Nathan Zuckerman
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The actor should not play a part. Like the Aeolian harps that used to be hung in the trees to be played only by the breeze, the actor should be an instrument played upon by the character he depicts.”
—Alla Nazimova (1879–1945)
“No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavouring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)