Gauguin's Pictures
Philip Roth makes an obvious connection between Neil and the boy who comes into the library. Neil sympathized with the boy who stared at Gauguin's pictures of Tahiti all day, desiring this life that he didn't have. Short Hills even began to remind Neil of the stream in the pictures. Later in the story, the struggle to keep the book in the library began to parallel the trouble that Neil was having fitting into the Patimkin family, and at the very end, Neil found that the book was checked out. He said he never saw the boy again but that it was for the best because it was silly to carry those dreams around. This occurs immediately before Neil and Brenda end their relationship.
Do you as the reader feel that such a drawn out symbol is necessary? Does this parallelism take away from the story or add to it and why? For what other reason do you feel Roth added this child into the story?
1 comment:
I don't think anything is ever necessary in a story, but I think that fact that Roth added this connection between Neil and the Gaugin boy really added to the story, adding another demension to Neil's character. As it was mentioned in class today, the boy represents another class in the story. So you have a lower class, a middle class, and a somewhat upper class. It also shows Neil's interactions with others when he is not with Brenda, and how being with Brenda has made him more authoratative, being able to defend himself when the main who wants to check out the Gauguin book complains about him.
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