Quote:
Originally Posted by SlowRain
All of this is why I wonder if Zuckerman is Roth's nice cop and Kepesh is his bad cop. Roth seems to have staked his reputation on Zuckerman and, as such, uses Zuckerman to portray his own gentle ideas. However, I think Roth gets peeved sometimes, and so he uses Kepesh to insulate himself from the ideas--but they're still his true feelings. Is that a possibility?
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I don't know, babe. I never met the man.
You are right that Zuckerman and Kepesh stories deal with different themes but the Zuckerman stories are far more fraught than the Kepesh stories.
I agree Zuckerman is likable and Kepesh is not, but mild and humble? I don't think so. He has a pretty fair, possibly even inflated, notion of his worth as a writer. He chases old men around graveyards threatening their lives. Is that humble or mild? I am not saying Zuckerman is an egoist and I acknowledge that his shenanigans are often a response to stress but he is not a boy scout to Kepesh's satyr. He is artist to Kepesh's critic.
But Zuckerman's more pleasant personality aside, the stories he is involved in and creates are far darker than Kepesh's. The three later novels that are often called the American trilogy are ostensibly the true stories of the people he knows but Zuckerman is hardly a reliable narrator. Besides being a terrible snoop, he is an ardent fabulist. Look at the life he creates for Amy Bellette in
The Ghostwriter. It's not enough that she is a charming, European Jewess lucky to be alive after the Holocaust. She has to be Anne Frank returned from the dead...literally. She has to be Kafka's little sister, metaphorically.
I think not liking the Kepesh of
The Dying Animal is the point of the exercise to some extent. Still he is a good appreciator. Consuela doesn't go to anyone else when she is losing her breasts. She goes to him. Someone she hasn't seen in quite a while. Does she love him? I don't think so. I think she is going to the man who will understand her loss.