Abstract
One of the many things that fascinate me about Philip Roth’s work is his fascination with asceticism — with the deliberate frustration of desire, the denial of appetite, the refusal of gratification. My title combines two strikingly ascetic images, one taken from the Zuckerman novels, the other from the Kepesh novels. In The Ghost Writer, E. I. Lonoff asks for half an egg for his breakfast — a humorous gesture but not trivial, because of his habit of self-denial and self-limitation (p. 158);1 and in The Professor of Desire David Kepesh tells Claire how Kafka shuddered at the sight of an office-mate eating a sausage for lunch, and said, ‘The only fit food for a man is half a lemon’ (p. 168).
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Note
References in the essay are to the following editions of Philip Roth’s works:
Goodbye, Columbus (1959; repr. New York: Bantam, 1963).
The Breast (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972).
My Life as a Man (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974).
The Professor of Desire (1977; repr. New York: Bantam, 1978).
Zuckerman Bound (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985).
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© 1988 Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson
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Green, M. (1988). Half a Lemon, Half an Egg. In: Milbauer, A.Z., Watson, D.G. (eds) Reading Philip Roth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19119-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19119-2_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-19121-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-19119-2
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