American Pastoral is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman by Philip Roth, friend and admirer of the Levovs, particularly Seymour “The Swede” Levov. Zuckerman tells the story of the Swede's tragic fall from youthful perfection due to his daughter's terrorist act in protest against the Vietnam War. However, if Zuckerman is truly a friend and peer of the Swede, his seemingly omniscient knowledge of the Swede's private affairs and affairs proves that Zuckerman has simply been a large part of the Swede's exciting life. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay From a young age, Zuckerman was enamored with the perfection of the Swede and his embodiment of the American dream. When the Swede calls Zuckerman “Skip,” Zuckerman tells the reader, “I was thrilled. I blushed, I was delighted,” which clearly shows how emotionally charged Zuckerman was after receiving a fairly innocent and common nickname. However, the tricolon of terse first-person verbs and the repetition of "I was delighted" emphasize that this was a very personal moment for Zuckerman and that the "secret, personal bond" they apparently shared had an immediate and profound effect. This obsession and hyperbolic reaction to an ordinary scene suggests that Zuckerman is blindly infatuated with the Swede, a fact that could ultimately lead him to invent scenes or read too much into the Levovs' lives, clear signs of an unreliable narrator. Additionally, at the very beginning of the novel, Zuckerman simply begins with "The Swede" before mentioning that Zuckerman himself was a classmate of the Swede's younger brother, and only ten pages later we finally acknowledge that Zuckerman is " the author.” Indeed, even when we discover the identity of the narrator, it is entirely subordinate to that of the Swede: “The Swede's younger brother was my classmate… 'Are you Zuckerman?'/'My name is Zuckerman. ' Zuckerman, then, does this to present the novel as being entirely about the Swede's life, which would perhaps suggest a certain level of reliability; however, by placing his own, hopefully unbiased, ideas as incidental to the story, Zuckerman allows them to be altered based on the excitement and thrill the Swede generates. Roth's narrator “thus appears as illusory as the character he tries to expose” (Literary Kicks) because he does everything to convince himself that the Swede's life is exceptional. Zuckerman, quite early in the novel, admits that what he is going to write may in fact be false. He tells the reader that "you fight your superficiality, your superficiality, to try to address people... without an overload of prejudice", which, on first reading, goes some way to explaining the task of a biographer: to consider the life of the person in an impartial and impartial manner. objectively possible, by simply documenting the facts of this life. However, Zuckerman then admits that "the fact remains that making people okay is not what life is all about anyway." Life is about making mistakes. » Such ideas reverse Zuckerman's earlier explanations, because he suggests that although we can attempt to be unprejudiced, this is futile and we end up with the wrong understanding. However, even though the passage exhibits brutal honesty and "is clearly intended as a warning" (Literary Kicks), we cannot ignore the fact that Zuckerman openly admits that what he is about to write is most likely false, whether or not he perceives this imperfection as human nature. Does the “bias” extend to his initial misreading of the Swede, but also to hisglobal documentation of life. Only thirty-five pages, and Zuckerman himself told us he was an unreliable narrator. Zuckerman narrates the novel in a seemingly omniscient manner. telling the reader about various episodes that might never have happened. He overtly leaves gaps of time in the narrative, and the use of hindsight in Roth's screenplay might suggest that Zuckerman then spends the rest of the novel filling in these pauses. Zuckerman writes about "One Night in the Summer of 1985," then turns to the next page and a letter received "a few weeks before Memorial Day, 1995." This ten-year hiatus perhaps implies that Zuckerman only has a clear idea of ​​what happened in 1985 and 1995, and that to tell the Swede's story he must imagine what happened passed between the two. Later in the novel, Zuckerman even writes: "On the sweet notes of 'Dream,' I walked away from myself...and I dreamed of a realistic chronicle and...I found it in Deal," prefacing an incestuous moment between the Swede and his 11-year-old daughter at the beach – “Daddy, kiss me like you kiss umumumother”. This language of dreams and creation can only lead the reader to believe that Zuckerman is turning away from the Swede's real life and reinventing it, in a perverse way. , at a moment of extreme taboo. Zuckerman's knowledge of the moments with Rita Cohen in the hotel room, Merry's confession about the bombings and the affairs between Dawn and Orcutt and the Swede and Sheila further raise a question: how does he know these However , in keeping with the belief that humans should always be wrong, Zuckerman questions the art of writing and suggests that invention is the very essence of fiction. He asks, “Should everyone go away and lock the door.” and sit isolated as solitary writers do… invoking people with words…? » and concludes again that “life is about making mistakes, about making mistakes, about making mistakes and about making mistakes. » This metafiction in which Zuckerman implies that strictly and precisely confining a person's life to 400 pages is humiliating suggests that the Swede's life is, in the story of American Pastoral, fictitious. In a way, Zuckerman becomes Roth's alter-ego: “Zuckerman. acts as an additional layer between the author and the fiction” (Paul Smith). However, to claim that Zuckerman is Roth would be to suggest that Roth was a childhood friend of the Swede but also omniscient, a paranormal claim. The conclusion is that the only reason Zuckerman can write about the Swede's traumatic events is because he made them up, so, beyond the times he actually spends with the Swede, it is not only unreliable but also totally false. The narrator therefore wonders what it is. means to be ordinary and there is debate, as part of the American lifestyle, about whether that is actually a good thing. After the Swede tells Zuckerman about his "eighteen-year-old Chris, sixteen-year-old Steve, and fourteen-year-old Kent," Zuckerman calls the Swede a "human platitude." Zuckerman, perhaps sarcastically, writes that "the life of the Swede Levov, as far as I knew, had been the simplest and most ordinary and therefore simply great, exactly in the American sense." This could therefore imply that, whereas Zuckerman once considered the Swede to be totally perfect, this conception has now become boring and, having become an author, Zuckerman desires an even higher degree of excitement, "right in the American sense." becomes a critique of the American dream; if being ordinary means the Swede has achieved the American dream, then the American dream must therefore be boring. By analyzing Zuckerman, “we can see his motivations.