4. Exit Ghost Writer: Philip Roth

Abstract

Reading Philip Roth alongside Paul Auster and focusing on Roth’s primary ghost writer, Nathan Zuckerman, this chapter examines the relation of a writer to his subject in terms of a responsibility to the dead and a necessary betrayal of the dead. It argues that this inevitable interruption of the other’s story is an interruption of the self’s story also, which Roth illustrates by creating series of ghost writers who haunt the one story, the one name, the one face. For Roth, the ghost writer is not living, only writing, and there is always the possibility of betrayal, or of being displaced, effaced, or erased by another’s story.