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

way to make oneself visible. The subject, in fact, is invisible to himself unless he manages to see his reflection in a mirror.

Masks are metaphoric devices because they revolve around a boundary-crossing, allowing impersonation to take place. Masking stages an idea of identity as dynamic and performative—it transforms the self while transforming the other. The mode of this performative transformation is rhetorical not in the static sense of employing stylistic devices, but in the sense of happening through language.

My Life as a Man witnesses the inevitable sliding toward impersonation as the novelist’s veritable dwelling place. To play with words, one might say that the biographical subject, that is, the novelist’s material, is of interest only when subject(ed) to a narrative transformation. This implies acknowledging that a reality without mirrors (and mirrorings) does not exist, as Roth’s autobiography, The Facts, attests.

It is not simply a matter of displacing easily recognizable biographical elements onto Tarnopol and consequently onto Tarnopol’s foil, Zuckerman, it is much more a matter of exploring the inner workings of authorship—rendering metanarratively audible the author’s comments on his work, building a fictional world made up of alternative representations of the same subject, and questioning the choices made.

At the thematic center of the novel lies the dismal “true story” Tarnopol is obsessed by—his marriage to Maureen Johnson. According to their “author,” the two initial fictions constitute two different narrative ways of addressing “more or less […] the Subject” (483). As a reader, one is given “the subject” in reversed order—first, the two “Zuckerman variations” altering and defacing the “actual facts,” then “My True Story.” Tarnopol as Zuckerman comes before Tarnopol as Tarnopol.

Roth wrote about “Courting Disaster” in The Facts: