American Pastoral Analysis

Philip Roth's American Pastoral spans 100 years and four generations of Levovs (but the first generation doesn't get much play). The chronology is topsy-turvy. The book begins at the end, ends in t...

The narrative structure of American Pastoral is much discussed. First of all, a discussion of the fiction-writing process is part of the novel. In the first part of the book, we meet the famous aut...

American Pastoral spans four generations of the Levov family; family conflict is at the heart of the story. It's one version of what can happen to a family when tragedy strikes, this time in the fo...

Blood may be thicker than water, but nostalgia is thicker than freaking molasses in American Pastoral.The nostalgia running through American Pastoral—nostalgia in the sense of looking back with l...

Okay, full disclosure: we kind of made that word up. That's what happens when we go into style overload. And Roth has made an industry (that would challenge Newark Maid) out of literary style. He's...

We have some handy-dandy definitions of "pastoral," from the Oxford English Dictionary Online, that totally apply to this novel:3. a. A literary work portraying rural life or the life of shepherds,...

1) "Dream when the day is thru,Dream and they might come true,Things never are as bad as they seem,So dream, dream, dream."— Johnny Mercer, from "Dream," a popular song in the 1940s. 2) "the rare...

American Pastoral isn't linear; it doesn't move in a straight line through time. The novel opens at "the end" in 1995. The Swede, Lou, and Merry are all dead, and Zuckerman has finished writing the...

There are absolutely no reasons why you shouldn't read American Pastoral, but it is depressing, chaotic, and nonlinear. Not to mention that the ending exploded our brains. We're still begging for a...

Aging author Nathan Zuckerman learns that his childhood idol Seymour "The Swede" Levov (dead from cancer two years before) has a daughter (who might be dead, too) that bombed a post office to prote...

American Pastoral is a tragedy, told mostly from the perspective of Seymour "Swede" Levov, the main character, the tragic hero. But, the Swede isn't a good fit for the Booker tragic hero—a hero...

"Paradise Remembered"In this act we learn that author Nathan Zuckerman's high school idol Seymour "Swede" Levov has died. The Swede had a daughter who bombed a post office in the small town of Rimr...

"The Zuckerman oeuvre weighs in at 2,215 clothbound pages, not counting Nathan's letter to Roth in the author's autobiography ("The Facts")" or the 2007 Exit Ghost. (Source)A ringtone of Phili...

By Philip Roth novel standards the sex in American Pastoral is relatively subdued, though there's lots of sexually charged language. There are two main sections of the novel where sex comes into pl...

William Carlos Williams, "At Kenneth Burke's Place" (Epigraph)John R. Tunis, The Kid from Tomkinsville, Iron Duke, The Duke Decides, Champion's Choice, Keystone Kids, Rookie of the Year. (1.9)Leo T...