Portnoys Complaint By Philip Roth Essay Research

Portnoy.s Complaint By Philip Roth Essay, Research Paper

Portnoy.s Complaint was Philip Roth.s third novel. It was a story about a young man.s search for freedom using forbidden sex as his way of escape. This book was found by many readers to be offensive and pornographic because of its protagonist.s use of obscene language and sex scenes. The story records the intimate confessions of Alexander Portnoy to his psychiatrist. Portnoy goes through his adolescent obsession with masturbation and his relationship with his over possessive mother, Sophie. Portnoy.s .complaint. refers to the damage done to him by the culture that has shaped him; although he is successful, his achievements are marred by a nagging sense of guilt. He finds himself on Dr. Speilvogel.s couch trying to determine how and why he has become a sexual and moral obsessive in the hopes of being cured, or at least a little less obsessed with various bodily liquids and all orifices. Instead, Portnoy.s narrative of his past becomes the case history that serves as the evidential basis of a medical diagnosis. Speilvogel discovers Portnoy.s Complaint, and by doing so, he has thereby authoritatively reduced Portnoy.s experiences into a category of neurosis. Speilvogel simply rewrites Portnoy.s wild, comic rantings into a .disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of perverse nature. Portnoy.s approach to experience is often ironic and has the effect of a stand-up comedian.s patter. Jewish family and its values are held up to ridicule, and particular criticism has been leveled to Roth.s presentation of the Jewish mother.

Roth.s novel, Portnoy.s Complaint, is the story of Alex Portnoy, a Jewish male with an oppressive, .castrating. mother. As a boy, young Alex Portnoy nearly suffocates

from parental expectations that he be the smartest, neatest, and best-behaved little boy in his school. His melodramatic mother, aspiring to impress gentile America with her perfect offspring, over-supervises him and turns minor infractions into operatic disappointments. At times, for frustrating her, he is locked out of his home. Portnoy, in his adolescence, rebels against her mostly by indulging in acts of which she does not approve. Obscenity and masturbation become the primary ways in which Portnoy asserts his freedom.

As he grows older, these forms of rebellion persist. Often his transgressions turn to guilt: .Why must the least deviation from respectable convention cause me such inner hell.. When I know better than the taboos!. (Roth, 124). Most of the times, however, he seems to find it is surprisingly easy to transgress; the only obstacle to freedom is his hesitation. After being treated to his first lobster dinner by his sister.s boyfriend, Portnoy is tempted to masturbate on the darkened bus back to New Jersey with a gentile girl sitting beside him. The adult Portnoy, on second thoughts, speculates that being encouraged to violate the Jewish dietary code also prompted him to take a sexual risk: . The taboo so easily and simply broken, confidence may have been given to the whole slimy suicidal Dionysian side of my nature; the lesson may have been learned that to break the law, all you have to do is- just go ahead and break it!. Stop trembling and quaking and finding it unimaginable and beyond you: all you have to do is do it!. (Roth, 79).

Not wanting to feel .obedient and helpless. (Roth, 73) also impels Portnoy to challenge the mainstream culture. And here as well, his rebellion manifests itself

sexually and revolves around his exclusive interest in Christian girls. If sex is exciting for Portnoy when it is secretive and .bad.- the antithesis of the moral goodness imbued in Alex by his parents- sex with a .shikse., is twice as arousing. It violates not only the Jewish community.s expectations that he marry a Jew, but it also imposes his dirty will on the clean blond daughters of the gentile middle class; it asserts his arrival in the mainstream and his full entitlement as a male American. .I don.t seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds- as though through fucking I will discover America. Conquer America- maybe that.s more like it. (Roth, 235).

His speech is littered with obscenity and sexist language, and his relationships with women are self-serving. Women are merely objects through whom he might vent his anger and, as Irving Buchanan contends, .his sexuality is.masturbatory sexuality employed to degrade, to revenge and to heap contempt on.women. (103). Portnoy.s impulse to degrade women is inextricably linked to his use of language. His obscenity reveals his sexual immaturity, and diminishes both the sex act it describes and the women he encounters. Indeed Portnoy.s reliance on .foul. language is meant to suggest a linguistic inadequacy that parallels his sexual inadequacy. As Robert Forray observes, the frustration born from Portnoy.s .five-hundred word New Jersey vocabulary. is linked inextricably to the lack of sexual fulfillment that degenerates ultimately into impotence (276).

For all his shortcomings, Portnoy is an engaging figure in some respects. His narrative is amusing and the other characters in the novel seem extremely bland by comparison. As the book progresses, however, a more sinister dimension to Portnoy is

revealed. For ins