Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995-2010)

[...]for Pozorski, American history is traumatic to its very roots; and Roth's propensity, in his later fiction, to reference central figures in the foundational narrative of the United States-such as Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln-despite what appears to be a thematic focus on the post-World War II era indicates a sustained effort to illustrate this "fundamental truth about America" (2). The effect, for Pozorski, is a sense of "skewed temporality" in Roth's work, that opens up the possibility of reading his recent fictional treatments of significant historical moments in postwar American life-Vietnam, McCarthyism, the Culture Wars, the Korean War, and 9/11-as indicative of both Roth's literary need to wrestle with the particular traumatic national events that shaped his generation, and of an ongoing encounter with the original traumatic event in American history, the American Revolution, which remains, in Caruth's terms, an "unclaimed experience" that the nation seems compelled to revisit, retell and repeat as it struggles to come to terms with the legacy of its violent founding. Something affirmative in Roth's view of the enduring but often contradictory nature of the American democratic psyche is articulated in the individual striving of late Rothian characters such as the Swede, Mickey Sabbath, Ira Ringold, Coleman Silk, and Marcus Messner, in their struggles, in their human, error-ridden and often destructive attempts to fashion their own American lives in spite of the limitations imposed by race, ideology, inequality, convention, and all of the other inescapable historical encumbrances that Ralph Ellison described as "the builtin conditions which comprise the pathology of American democracy" (598). [...]he also suggested, the fact that not all of American history is recorded may contain a saving grace; for if it were, if each generation of Americans were faced with the full record of painful, discouraging, contradictory facts without the consoling features of myth, nostalgia or grand narrative, "we might become so chagrined by the discrepancies which exist between our democratic ideals and our social reality that we would soon lose heart" (598).