Nathan Zuckerman is one of Roth’s most central characters, and any thorough study of Roth and his work requires an exploration of Zuckerman’s role in Roth’s development as a writer. In many ways, Roth’s career, his concerns, and his confrontation with illness and age, are reflected and refracted through Zuckerman, This chapter addresses the interpretation of Zuckerman as one of Roth’s “alter-egos”, from the time he first appears in 1974 in My Life as a Man, to his role in novels now collected as “Zuckerman Bound” [The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and The Prague Orgy (1985)] to The Counterlife (1986), and then the “American Trilogy”—American Pastoral (1997), I Married A Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)—before bidding farewell in 2007’s Exit Ghost.

This chapter will address the place of the “Philip Roth” novels—which include The Facts (1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony (1991), Operation Shylock (1993), and The Plot Against America (2004)—within Roth’s career at large, as well as the critical response to those novels. In addition to being among the most evident examples of Roth’s postmodern techniques, this particular categorization of books is also unique because, unlike Zuckerman and Kepesh, the identity of the character “Philip Roth” himself shifts from book to book. For instance, while the “Philip Roth” of The Plot Against America is a character in Roth’s dystopian alternate history, the “Philip Roth” of The Facts and Patrimony is more closely aligned with Roth the author, adding new levels to his blurring of fact and fiction.