Fictions of Metamorphosis: From Goodbye, Columbus to Portnoy’s Complaint

Abstract

At the centre of virtually all Roth’s fiction, from the stories of Goodbye, Columbus to the Zuckerman Bound trilogy, is an action of character transformation: a bizarre metamorphosis in which a new self emerges to stand in striking opposition to the old. The strangeness of the transformation lies not only in its improbability or the grotesqueness of the new self, but in the survival of the old as a grudging yet tenacious partner. Like the different phases of desire in Freud’s theory of psychic development, former and present selves coexist as the distorting masks of each other, preserving rather than reconciling the tension between them. The transformations, in other words, are always incomplete — dramas of changing rather than change, of characters struggling between competing claims to their identity.