Philip Roth, Portnoy's complaint

Résumé du document

The text under scrutiny presents us an extract of the confession of a man to his psychiatrist: he talks to him more precisely about his childhood, and the way his mother used to act with him during that period. What is interesting about this text is the manner the narrator presents his memory: our study will therefore focus on the way the upset speech of the narrator reveals the deep traumatism of a man confronted to his own past. We will first enlighten how the narrator and his memory can be seen as the mainspring of the text. We will then go on to explain the relations the narrator seems to have had with his mother, and in a third point, we will endeavour to show how this memory about his mother could have had consequential effects that show through his confession.

Extraits

[...] Philip Roth, Portnoy's complaint [The narrator is talking to his psychiatrist about his own childhood.] 1 Then there are the nights I will not eat. My sister, who is four years my senior, assures me that what I remember is fact: I would refuse to eat, and my mother would find herself unable to submit to such wilfulness-and such idiocy. [ . ] 5 Please! A child with my potential! My accomplishments! My future! [...]

[...] Is the man or the child speaking? These two aspects of the man here gathered: the fears of the child are the disbelieves of the adult. This extract can thus leads us to wonder about the function of psychoanalysis: Freud has indeed discovered that events happening during our childhood can mark our adult life, but we can still wonder if it is necessary to get rid of them, since, joyful or not, they build our own personality, with his failures and strengths. [...]

[...] Do I want to be pushed around and made fun of, do I want to be skin and bones that people can knock over with a sneeze, or do I want to command respect? Which do I want to be when I grow up, weak or strong, a 15 success or a failure, a man or a mouse? I just don't want to eat, I answer. So my mother sits down in a chair beside me with a long bread knife in her hand. It is made of stainless steel, and has little 20 sawlike teeth. [...]

[...] All his memory starts from an apparently insignificant event: the fact that he refused to eat, reason besides repeated thrice: would refuse to “starve myself to death”(l.7) and just don't want to (l.16). Furthermore, we can guess that this event was recurrent, as the use of the modal which has an iterative value, could reveal. All the text is so based upon this anecdote. The text revolves around the narrator, and the memory he talks about to his doctor and which is presented to the reader. [...]

[...] The behaviour, both almost cruel and shocking of the mother towards her child, has led them to strange relations. We can first note that the narrator only called the woman mother” while he could use a more affectionate nickname as The distance and the differences between them are sum up in their different points of view about the behaviour of the narrator: if the mother thinks that he is “starving to death” the child quietly replied that he “just (doesn't) want to (l.16). [...]