“A question shot through his brain. ‘Can this me me?’ For a thirteen-year-old who had just labeled his religious leader a bastard, twice, it was not an improper question. Louder and louder the question came to him – ‘Is it me? It is me?’… ‘Is it me? Is it me Me ME ME ME! It has to be me – but is it!’”
If you know anything at all about Philip Roth, you know that his stories are brilliant. Surely they are blasphemous, they undermine all the conventions of religious and conventional moralities, and they have lots of issues with semi-rebellious men, but WOW! Brilliant.
Before we get into Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer, I’m going to take a look at how his prose works in connection with the modern crisis of identity we’ve seen in Nabokov and Williams. Roth’s story “The Conversion of the Jews” is a good place to start because it specifically concerns itself with that moment when a boy becomes a man, refusing any longer to accept the limits placed on him by the adults who had previously controlled his life (but perhaps not yet realizing that he needs to beware of his own limits as well).
Sartre tell us that his “duty as an intellectual is to think, to think without restriction, even at the risk of blundering. I must set no limits within myself, and I must let no limits be set for me.” Ozzie is now learning that the limits set by others will be consistently wrong for him. He is a good boy, and the reader knows this because Ozzie asks good questions, and he seeks to learn. When the rabbi tries to get him to speed up his Hebrew reading, for instance, “Ozzie said he could read faster but that if he did he was sure not to understand what he was reading.” He asks, as a response to this rabbi, why he would ever seek to limit the power of God: “Why can’t He make anything He wants to make!”… “You don’t know! You don’t know anything about God!” In true existential fashion, Ozzie stands alone in his realization.
Here we see Sartre in Roth: the existential dilemma ending in the realization that “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on Earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this Earth.” I don’t connect the two thinkers lightly. I would not understand Roth as anything except a talented, foul-mouthed wit (as I would similarly not understand Salinger or Mamet) without seeing that Portnoy, Zuckerman, or Sabbath are always trying to reconcile their life experiences with the limits society has placed on and inside them. And it is only when these men become heroic deniers of such limits that they reach anything like their full potentials. However, Roth doesn’t give anyone characters to follow. We shouldn’t want to be Ozzie or Sabbath. Roth’s men are never going to be better than his readers. And there’s the key: Even the reader needs to look inside himself in order to find his personal aim.
What Ozzie discovers is that being good is only possible when one judges oneself as good. Here I’m reminded of the ending of Joyce’s “The Dead.” Gabriel is clearly a “good” husband, as society would judge such things, and Gabriel is very conscious of society’s judgment. But he realizes that he has failed in the role because he knew that he “had never felt that way about any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.” When Gabriel realizes his own shortcoming, he is saddened by it, but he has become himself in this moment BECAUSE he has become his own judge. In Ozzie Roth has created a character who looks outside himself for religious answers and realizes that such answers aren’t to be found outside. Then he finds the answer in the midst of a crisis of identity, and the answer was his all along. He exclaims, “Mamma, don’t you see – you shouldn’t hit me. He shouldn’t hit me. You shouldn’t hit me about God, Mamma. You should never hit anybody about God—…. Promise me, promise me you’ll never hit anybody about God.”
Of course, Roth’s readers know that as soon the rabbi or his mother (both of whom are physically abusive in the story) get their hands on Ozzie, he will be hit. But that violence doesn’t matter now. Or, better, it matters AFTER the story ends because the reader understands that Ozzie’s epiphany is his armor. Now at thirteen, Ozzie knows that he is alone in this world, and it is that fact of being alone which will empower him to be totally himself. This is Huckleberry Finn refusing to turn in Jim: “Alright, then, I’ll go to hell!” and it’s John Prentice dismissing his father: “Got take care of my mother. I’ve got a decision to make, and I’ve got to make it in a hurry.” And Roth ends with Ozzie coming down to be with the people again, but now “into the center of the yellow net that glowed in the evening’s edge like an overgrown halo.” He is saved by his own realization of being alone.
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