Novelist Philip Roth Appears to Imply Multiple Personality in 1981 Interview

Interviewer: I was just interested in what your idea of reading is.

Philip Roth: I read fiction to be freed from my own suffocatingly narrow perspective on life and to be lured into imaginative sympathy with a fully developed narrative point of view not my own. It’s the same reason that I write.

According to Roth, when he writes, he is “lured into imaginative sympathy with a fully developed narrative point of view not [his] own.” He doesn’t say that he imagines a point of view different from his own. He says he is lured into imaginative sympathy with a point of view that is not his own and is already fully developed. It is a narrative perspective just as distinct from his own as the narrative perspective of another writer, another person. But since we know, objectively, that it is not the perspective of another person, we would have to call it the fully developed narrative point of view of an alternate personality, which would be experienced as not his own.

Interviewer: [Asks if various of Roth’s characters represent Roth.]

Philip Roth: Am I Lonoff? Am I Zuckerman? Am I Portnoy? I could be, I suppose. I may yet be. But as of now I am nothing like so sharply delineated as a character in a book. I am still amorphous Roth.

When usually asked this question, as he often is, Roth typically gets on his high horse and answers the way he did when he was asked it earlier in this same interview, when he answered, “You should read my books as fiction…”

But here he appears to have switched to a different, less guarded, host personality (see blog glossary). This more “amorphous” host says that he is not Lonoff, Zuckerman, or Portnoy, but he could metamorphose or switch to being one of those other personalities, and he may yet do so.

Alain Finkielkraut (Interviewer). “Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur” (1981), in Philip Roth’s Reading Myself and Others. New York, Vintage International, 2001, pp. 98-110.