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1.2 The Significance of American Pastoral
Gathered together for the first time in a seventh volume of The Library of America’s Definitive Edition of Philip Roth’s Collected Works is the acclaimed American Trilogy, a major milestone in contemporary American literature. American Pastoral, published in 1997, was the first one of Philip Roth’s later American trilogies, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Literature in 1998. The novel is composed of three parts, including Paradise Remembered, The Fall and Paradise Lost, which gives an account of the history of the Levov family from the time of the Great Depression to the end of the 20th century with narrative style of montage from the perspective of the narrator. As a successful third-generation American Jewish immigrant, Seymour relied on self-assimilation and identity recognition and found a fusion of the road between the Jewish culture and American culture in the cracks. However, the Vietnam War and the intensification of the domestic racial contradictions made his beautiful Utopian fantasies fall into pieces.
Merry, his daughter, threw a bomb in the protest that destroyed his American Dream and put him fail into the real situation of American Jews in the 1960s from a masked false life. Marry was born in the 1950s and grew up in the 1960s, which was a troubled times. She was deeply influenced by the American social environment and she actively attended the radical anti-war groups, fighting against the local society with the attitude of cynics.来.自/751论|文-网www.751com.cn/
With the pass of the paradise and the burst of dreams, Levov family were caught into a nightmare that was impossible to escape. The betrayal of his wife, the fugitive of her daughter and the self-helplessness of himself brought the breakdown of his family. The experience of the Levov family shows the rise and fall of an American Jewish family. The American history in the 1960s is not only the Swede’s tragedy, but it is also the disaster of the temporal United States. The motivation of the American Dream is so complicated that no one is able to really understand it.
Since the publication of American Pastoral, it draws lots of attention of literature critics. Professor Wang Shouren in the “New History of American Literature” said, “This piece of work has been Roth’s most thoughtful depth so far. Roth made a profound study of the gap between the older generation of Jews and younger generation and the emergence of conflicting opposition”(2009:264). Derek Royal argued that American Pastoral shows how inpidual identities reflect national identities as well as how the power of American history threatens to transcend inpidual freedom and rights (2005:187). Catherine Morley argued that Roth focused on the persity of American national identity with great passion in American Pastoral (2009:87). Elena Safer found an
important concept hidden in Roth’ novels that life is an absurdly paradoxical theater, in which it is known as the inharmonious between the ideal and reality, the sacred and secular, the ambitious and inaction (2006:9).
After reading the contradictory life in Roth’s novels, Safer pointed out that American pastoral is full of ridicules, which is implementation rationale through the contrast between the ideal and degradation. Brauner believes this is a great novel, a classic tragedy because of the arrogance of the hero and the inexorable historical force” (2007:100).