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

magnifying and distancing effects different choices in personal pronouns allow. The most prominent feature of the book is, in fact, the continuous change back and forth from third-person to first-person narration. Tarnopol seems to be wondering how it feels to have (a deformation of ) his true story told using a mask in a third person restricted narration (“Salad Days”), using the same mask¹⁷ speaking in a first-person retrospective narration (“Courting Disaster”), and finally using his own unmasked voice (both in the third and in the first person). The overall movement of the novel seems to indicate a progressive skepticism first towards the possibility of masking and impersonation, and then towards literature tout court to solve Tarnopol’s biographical fixation. Whereas for Roth the novel demonstrates that he managed to outlive “the waste of [his] youthful strength” (TF 392), “for Tarnopol the presentation or description of himself is what is most problematical—and what remains unresolved” (Saxton 80).

But what about the reader? Roth himself, in the passage quoted earlier from The Facts concerning the therapeutic effect My Life as a Man had on his life, implicitly acknowledged that the reader might have a different perspective.¹⁸ The analysis of the internal logic of the book I have presented so far might be opaque for a first-time reader. It, in fact, rests on a very fragile premise; namely, the Note to the Reader which prefixes the text—only the Note helps the reader to take the title of the first section at face value, directing the attribution of the authorship of what follows to a man named Peter Tarnopol. But what happens if the reader forgets or skips the Note altogether, as is often the case with paratextual material? In this not-so-far-fetched case, only at the very end of “Salad Days” does the reader stumble across a paragraph that might reactivate the information provided by the Note, or else, motivate the asking of questions about the author of the “Salad Days” section. Even in the most optimistic case—a reader who considers and remembers the Note—the interpretation of the two useful fictions as “Zuckerman variations” on “more or less the Subject” is far from being readily available simply because “the Subject” has not been mentioned yet, let alone explained.