Divided and Double Self in Postmodern Times: A Study of Philip Roth’s Novel Operation Shylock: A Confession

Abstract

As a postmodernist author, Philip Roths intensity, creativity, imagination, and meta-fictional capability are really astounding and amazing. Everything becomes more clear and perceptible, when the reader perceives the novelists handling of his illusory and imaginary personages with rational and intellectual understanding.Operation Shylock: A Confession is a true postmodernist composition. It is Philip Roths most sarcastically and cynically knowledgeable novel, which invites his readers again to take leave of their intellect and logic and mystify the writer for his protagonist, an expected and imagined history for history itself. The text deals with Holocaust, identity crisis and Israel and American Jewry. Such postmodern consciousness of the identity is both sincere and potentially beneficial.The present paper will present how Operation Shylock turns out as an admirable and penetrative work that has arisen above the general levels of living and has touched the climatic spirit of postmodernism and ironic reality. Philip, is fictionalized autobiographical self, a hero with self-reflexivity appears as the novelists motif in a chaotic world. Here, Philip acts as a living representation of postmodernism who acknowledges himself to the disturbing gallery of Roths unconventional and individualist protagonists.

Keywords: Metafictional Capability, Holocaust, Self-Reflexivity, Postmodernism, Divided Self.