Abstract: Though readers often consider Portnoy's Complaint Philip Roth's youthfully excessive novel of obscenity and neurosis and then mark a change in style and temperament in the final novels (such as Nemesis ), this essay argues that the Jewishness of Roth's characters remains quite static, both in terms of the debilitating effects they exhibit, and the impact of debility on Roth's stratagem for establishing the Jewish subject. The formal strategies shift, but the "Jewish suffering" persists as a condition manifesting in self-blame, self-abuse, an internalized anxiety about disease, a perception of the self as weak or criminal or, indeed, in "wayward" behavior.
Marilyn Reizbaum (Sun,) studied this question.