Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Series of Books–Difficulties in Retrieving Coherence
Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Series of Books–Difficulties in Retrieving Coherence

Summary/Abstract: The readers of the Zuckerman books by Philip Roth are required quite a generous degree of activity in order to make the series appear completely coherent. Difficulties come from the fact that this is a nine-book project, which took Roth twenty-seven years to complete, a period when these books were interspersed with others. Also from the fact that the project contains such a variety of configurations and patterns, as over the years the treatment of the character Nathan Zuckerman (the main coherence device) has shifted dramatically, being used to serve a variety of purposes. The result is a number of surface inconsistencies that need to be explained by applying rules of coherence to make sense of all the project’s potentialities.

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