As I come to the end of American Pastoral, I still feel like I am really far away from grasping the novel as a whole.
I'm not really sure how to word this, because that doesn't sound right. I understand the main themes of the novel fairly well: we've got the whole traditionalism vs. anarchy, unconditional love, community, the passage of time...I could go on. I think I understand how these themes interconnect enough to say I understand the message of the book.
It's really more along the lines of: This book feels intensely personal. Every page is like reading another person's thoughts to yourself. I get the feeling that every sentence contains something critical, that the book is like a strand of DNA, or a million piece puzzle. I can talk about the themes, I can talk about the characters, but I feel like the scope of the book is too much for a single person. It's hard to believe a single person wrote it, until I think about how interconnected it all is and then I realize it just has to come from one guy's crazy, brilliant brain.
Honestly, Philip Roth wrote a masterpiece. It goes beyond just themes, and literary techniques as a whole, to the point where I'm literally freaked out by how realistic and organic everything seems at times.
The end of the book was not exactly shocking to me. I could feel the divide between Swede (who refused to believe in the disintegration of his own American Pastoral brought on by Merry's actions; even after finding her living in squalor and her admission that she and her anti-establishment group killed more people, he still heaps the blame on those around her and cannot view her as anything more than the smiling, laughing girl she used to be) and the rest of the world coming to a head throughout the majority of the book. And yet it still seemed so cruel and shocking to read.
Swede is at a dinner party with his wife, and through the course of the night he learns that not only is his wife having an affair with someone who is at the dinner party, she is planning to leave him. On top of that, a woman who he had once had an affair with admitted to sheltering Merry in the days after the Rimrock bombing, and little else.
The novel ends with Swede undergoing the realization that he is sitting in a room full of people who have completely betrayed him. The innocent trust that has characterized him throughout the novel has failed him. His dream, his ancestor's dream, his whole life, is shattered.
The denial of the American Pastoral has been foreshadowed throughout the entire book (the section names, for example). Swede's traditionalism, just like Merry's anarchism, is steeped in idealism. Swede believes in the innate goodness of people who he loves. He wouldn't love them if they weren't good, right? When faced with direct confirmation that someone he loves is evil, he immediately blames it on something else. He wasn't raised to handle imperfection, turmoil and betrayal, because he never acted in a way that induced this sort of behavior.
If you work hard and treat others well, you will succeed. Swede has followed this for his entire life. When Merry's behavior creates the first crack in his facade, he tries to rationalize it as some fault of his own, and when he cannot figure out where he went wrong, he denies any part he had in her behavior and therefore, denies her behavior as a result of her own judgement. It's the evil anti-Americans who turned her against me, he thinks, because it is either denial of evil or denial of the very principals that govern his life.
Until the dinner party.
"The old system that made order didn't work anymore. All that was left was [Swede's] fear and astonishment, concealed by nothing."
Just as Merry's self-righteous anarchism fell to the abuse, murder and abject poverty she experienced as a young radical, Swede's idealism is destroyed by the end of the novel. When he is finally confronted with evil from every direction, the picture perfect scene of a happy wife, a smiling daughter and a lovely house on a hill disintegrated. Swede's traditionalism fell to the realizations that mankind is evil and his American Dream is unachievable. The American Dream never existed in the first place. Generations of Swede's family built their lives upon the faraway promise of full assimilation, of the power that comes from success. Swede reaches it, he can almost touch the elusive dream, but what happens when he realizes that it's an empty promise?
Your last paragraph reminds me a lot of the ending of The Great Gatsby. The idea that Gatsby got so close to achieving his dream, but really that was an illusion, as his dream was already behind him...an impossible thing. Both novels suggest the problems of the American dream, though from two very different time periods. How do you see Roth's novel as commenting on the time period in which it' set?
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