Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: The Making of a Storyworld ...

in terms of predictive potential and consistent with the nature of the collected data.

In this respect, the crucial question to be addressed concerns the function and significance of these details. What should the detail exemplify? Does it have explanatory potential? And why should it be telling and worth unearthing in the first place?

The choice of approaching the subject through the analysis and the consequent amplification of narratological details is internally sustainable because Nathan Zuckerman is himself an author. Roth projects onto his favorite alter ego the burdens and pleasures of authorship; that is, of the actual making of fictional worlds to be engaged in and apprehended by an audience. This implies a constant attention to the art of fiction; metanarrative commentaries are, in fact, stepping stones in the process of Zuckerman’s looking for and finding his own distinctive voice as a writer. Furthermore, all of these details represent the textual junctures in which the readers’ repatterning of their working frame is most active.

Zuckerman’s first fully-fledged portrait in The Ghost Writer presents a writer basking in the radiance of E. I. Lonoff’s recognition that the particularity of his own authorial timbre is already audible. A much older Zuckerman remembers that visit as being animated by his wondering about what Lonoff might have meant. The answer begins to take shape through Nathan’s actual experimenting with the tools of his trade. The reader is both the witness to, and, in an important sense, the victim of Zuckerman’s first imaginative foray into the issue of the representation of historical events. The trick played on the reader, who is led to believe what he reads for a whole chapter, inaugurates what becomes a typical stance on Zuckerman’s part, mirroring his being—crucially—an author whose work revolves around the deft blurring of boundaries between what is imagined and what is real through a careful handling of the order and presentation of the events. More important still, he is an author obsessively preoccupied with himself. Zuckerman’s self-conscious reflections on his art illuminate Roth’s own poetics.

This is the reason why, at times, the analyses of the novels follow the same order of presentation of events that the reader experiences. This