Philip Roth's Novels: a Matter of Ventriloquism

This essay aims at illuminating the two sides of Roth’s novelistic project: novel writing as the instantiation of authorial intentional systems that are concretized by specific narratological decisions that transform “through an elaborate impersonation […] a personal emergency into a public act” and novel reading as a tentative alignment to each text’s individual voice. impersonating existential predicaments through the first or the third person pronoun is the writer’s way to confront his own situated self as an American and as a Jew, allowing those voices to resonate is part and parcel of letting novels establish themselves “as a correlative in the reader’s consciousness” (W. Iser).