The Holocaust in Philip Roth’s Fiction

This paper analyses the subject of the Holocaust in the fiction of American writer Philip Roth. Throughout his career, Roth had as a central theme the constitution and paradoxes of contemporary Jewish identity and, therefore, the Holocaust looms as central event among the elements that build this identity. Since his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, the author approaches the theme mainly through lenses that recognize the distance between the genocide that happened in Europe and the experience of an American-Jew such as himself. From this gap he explores how an identity organizes itself when one of its foundations is an historical event that has not been lived. This paper will look at this approach trough the lens of the autobiographical element aresource that shows up frequently in Roth`s oeuvre with the use of alter egos or even by the manipulation of the autobiographical pact and the way it intertwines the considerations about Jewish identity and an exploration of the relationship between fiction and reality, writer and character.

In the presentation, the main works about the theme will be adressed briefly, drawing a map of the relationship between Roth`s formal tools and his subject.