The American Pastoral is narrated by Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman, a friend and admirer of the Levovs, especially Seymour “The Swede” Levov. Zuckerman tells the story of the Swede's tragic fall from youthful perfection due to his daughter's terrorist act in protest against the Vietnam War. However, if Zuckerman is truly the Swede's friend and equal, Zuckerman's seemingly omniscient knowledge of the Swede's private affairs and relationships proves that Zuckerman has simply made up much of the Swede's exciting life. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay From an early age, Zuckerman is infatuated with the Swede's perfection and his embodiment of the American dream. When the Swede calls Zuckerman “Jump,” Zuckerman tells the reader, “I was thrilled. I blushed, I was thrilled,” which clearly denotes how emotionally charged Zuckerman was after receiving a fairly innocent and common nickname. However, the tricolon of terse first-person verbs and the repetition of “I was thrilled” emphasize that this was a very personal moment for Zuckerman and that the “secret, personal bond” they apparently shared had an immediate and profound effect. This obsession and hyperbolic reaction to an ordinary scene suggests that Zuckerman is blindly infatuated with the Swede, a fact that may ultimately lead to him. making up scenes or reading too much into the Levovs' lives, clear signs of an unreliable narrator. Furthermore, at the very beginning of the novel, Zuckerman simply opens with “The Swede” before mentioning that Zuckerman himself was a classmate of his younger brother. of the Swede, and only ten pages later we finally recognize that Zuckerman is “the author.” Indeed, even when we discover the identity of the narrator, it is entirely subordinate to that of the Swede: “The Swede's younger brother was my companion. class...'Are you Zuckerman?'/'I am Zuckerman.'” Zuckerman, therefore, does this to present the novel as entirely centered on the Swede's life, which would perhaps suggest a certain level of reliability; however, by inserting his own, hopefully unbiased, ideas as incidental to the story, Zuckerman allows them to be altered depending on the excitement and thrill the Swede is generating. Roth's narrator therefore "appears as self-deceived as the character he is attempting to expose" (Literary Kicks) as he goes to great lengths to convince himself that the Swede's life is exceptional. Zuckerman, fairly early in the novel, admits that what I write might actually be wrong. He tells the reader that you "fight your shallowness, your shallowness, so as to try to get close to people... without an overload of prejudice," which on first reading goes some way to explaining a biographer's task: to see life of the person in an impartial and impartial manner. objectively possible, simply documenting the facts of that life. However, Zuckerman then admits that “The fact remains that, in any case, making people right is not what it means to live. To live is to make them wrong." Such ideas invert Zuckerman's initial explanation, as he implies that even though one might attempt to be unprejudiced, it is futile and thus we gain the wrong understanding. However, while the passage presents a certain brutal honesty and “ is clearly intended as a disclaimer” (Literary Kicks), we cannot overlook the fact that Zuckerman openly admits that what he is about to write is most likely wrong, no matter if he perceives that imperfection as human nature Indeed, not just “bias” extends to his initial misreadingof the Swede, but also to his overall documentation of life. It's only thirty-five pages and Zuckerman himself told us he's an unreliable narrator. Zuckerman narrates the novel in a seemingly omniscient manner, telling the reader various incidents that may never have happened, he overtly leaves gaps of time in the narrative, and Roth's use of hindsight in the plot may suggest that Zuckerman spends the rest of the time. novel that fills those pauses. Zuckerman writes about “One Night in the Summer of 1985” only to jump to the next page to a letter received “a couple of weeks before Memorial Day, 1995.” This ten-year hiatus perhaps implies that Zuckerman only has a clear idea of ​​what happened in 1985 and 1995, and to tell the Swede's story he must imagine what happens in the meantime. Later in the novel, Zuckerman even writes, "To the sweet strains of 'Dream,' I turned away from myself...and dreamed of a realistic chronicle and...found it in Deal," prefacing an incestuous moment between the Swede and his 11 year old daughter at the beach - "Dad, kiss me like umumumother kisses". This language of dream and creation can only lead the reader to believe that Zuckerman distances himself from the Swede's real life and reimagines it, in a perverse way. , in a moment of extreme taboo. Zuckerman's knowledge of the moments with Rita Cohen in the hotel room, Merry's confession of the bombings, and the relationships between Dawn and Orcutt and the Swede and Sheila further raise the question: How does he know these things? things? However, in line with the belief that humans should always make mistakes, Zuckerman questions the art of writing and suggests that inventing it is the very essence of fiction. He asks: “Should we all go and close the door and sit alone like solitary writers do... conjuring people up with words...?” and further concludes that “to live is to make mistakes, to make mistakes, to make mistakes and to make mistakes”. This metanarrative by which Zuckerman connotes that strictly and carefully confining a person's life in 400 pages is humiliating, suggests that the Swede's life is, within the story of American Pastoral, fictitious. In a sense, Zuckerman becomes Roth's alter ego: “Zuckerman acts as an additional layer between author and fiction” (Paul Smith However, to argue that Zuckerman is Roth would be to suggest that Roth was a childhood friend of the Swede but then also omniscient, a paranormal claim and therefore, the only The bottom line is that the only reason Zuckerman can write about the Swede's traumatic events is that he made them up, so beyond the moments he actually spends with the Swede, he is not only unreliable but also completely false. The narrator then wonders what it is. means to be ordinary and discusses, in the American lifestyle, whether this is actually a good thing After the Swede tells Zuckerman about his "eighteen-year-old Chris, sixteen-year-old Steve, and fourteen-year-old Kent." Zuckerman calls Swedish a “human banality.” Zuckerman, perhaps sarcastically, writes that "the life of the Swede Levov, as far as I knew, had been very simple and ordinary and therefore simply fantastic, precisely in the American sense." And so this could imply that while Zuckerman previously saw the Swede as totally perfect, now this conception has become boring, and having become an author, Zuckerman desires an even higher level of excitement, however, “precisely in the American sense”. it becomes a criticism of the American dream; if being ordinary means that the Swede has succeeded in achieving the American dream, then the American dream must therefore be boring. Analyzing Zuckerman, “we can see his motivations for using storytelling to shape his own.