| Chapter : | Introduction |
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life writing, and yet she acknowledges that it does not work in this way with a writer:
“You do want to make a narrative out of it, with progress and momentum and dramatic peaks and then a resolution. You seem to see life as having a beginning, a middle, an ending, all of them linked together with something bearing your name. But it isn’t necessary to give things a shape.” (TC 178)
The following chapters trace the progress of the necessary shape Zuckerman’s narrative must take: its beginning, middle, and ending linked together by Roth’s name in disguise.
Having split his own “self,” having named him Nathan Zuckerman, Roth finally gets over it in Exit Ghost, having guided both him and the reader through a tortuous itinerary that explores and reconstructs what it might mean to be a highly conscious writer who happens to be a Newark Jew.