Alienation and Black Humor in Philip Roth's Exit Ghost (Critical Essay‪)‬

Ever since Portnoy, most of the protagonists in the many novels of Philip Roth have been outsiders (i.e., persons estranged in some way from their environment). This basically serious theme is illuminated by the ever-present--and sometimes macabre-black humor in which it is cast. Indeed, one way to read Roth's oeuvre is to trace the many variations--and the growing depth--in which he treats personalities distanced or even divorced from their settings. Take the case of the assimilated Jew, "Swede" Levov, and his daughter, Merry (American Pastoral, 1997). Swede's American dream and sense of belonging crash when Merry--estranged from her family and from contemporary America--becomes an anti-Vietnam War militant, a bomb planting terrorist, and later, a Jain ascetic. Swede's wife deceives him; his brother bursts out in a tirade expressing utter contempt for him; his fantasy of living the life of a country gentleman in the affluent WASP countryside of Old Rimrock turns to dust and ashes: "Whirling about inside him now was a frenzied distrust of everyone" (357). The narrator sums up the result: "The breach had been pounded in ... [his] fortification ... and now that it was opened it would not be closed again" (423).