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

to make hypotheses to fill in the textual gaps. In this respect, the portrait of the Rothian artist that emerges cannot but be provisionally coherent because it is the result of a continuing characterization process based on both textual and extra-textual inferences that, as such, are fallible.

If, as I strongly believe, the initial frame the reader applies in Zuckerman’s case is what I call the continuing character frame, it remains to be assessed if, how, and when the nine-book-long narrative I analyze will require the reader to revise and/or discard it. “The adequacy of a frame is continuously put to the test of incoming data and the analysis of the data depends to a considerable extent on the current frame. The frame tells us what the data is, and the data tells us whether we can continue using the frame” (Jahn, “Frames” 448). A postulate of sameness, in fact, does not imply consistency and continuity all the way through. Given the time span of Zuckerman’s narrative, he actually cannot but be potentially instable and intrinsically provisional because his portrait is based on assumptions that, as we have just seen, are not necessarily made textually available. One of the aims of this work is to bring to the fore the issue of consistency, to question inconsistencies and discontinuities, and to assess the continuous repatterning of the interpretive frame Nathan Zuckerman goes through. Does what I consider the initial frame integrate all textual data referring to Zuckerman in all “his” books? Must the frame be modified so as to integrate what Jahn calls “exceptional and recalcitrant data” (“Frames” 461)? What happens to our idea of Zuckerman in this second case? How does the reader come to terms with the different functions Zuckerman performs?

This intended exploration calls for a chronological treatment of the material, from the first encounter and the creation of an initial idea (and of an initial frame) to subsequent meetings and confirmation and/or redefinition of the original portrait. The Zuckerman books, as listed and spaced since the publication of The Human Stain, are: