Individual Identity in Philip Roths The Ghost Writer Essay -- Ghost W

Individual Identity in Philip Roths The Ghost Writer The idea of self, an individual authentic unique individuation, seems to be constantly questioned and challenged in Philip Roths The Ghost Writer. We ar presented with several portraits of artists, writers and would be writers, whose notion of self is in some significant manner tied to their art. Rather than knitting together a unified (rehabilitated?) ideal of self, aesthetic creativity, art, complicates and further problematizes the issue of identity. Art simultaneously undermines and underscores insights provided by a supposedly seamless master narrative. The creative impulses and ideas which inspire an artist to create may have little or nothing to do with the meaning or meanings assigned to the art itself by a virtually endless chain of interpreters. Writers be thus distanced from their texts at the same time an audience, a reader, is constructing an identity for him/herself and for the author based on the te xt. Nathan Zuckerman, the narrator, is motivated to become a great novelist because in plowshare of his romanticized notions of writing and writers. His identity becomes entangled in the works of E.I. Lonoff. Nathan rejects the pleas of his father to place his identity as a member of a family and as a Jew to a higher place his identity as a writer. Evoking Joyces Stephen Dedalus, Roths Nathan Dedalus places his identity as an artist above other concerns. He seeks a new intellectual/spiritual father in Lonoff. First from Lonoffs writings and then from the personal encounter with Lonoff himself, Nathan hopes that by emulating Lonoff in all aspects, he will become more like the idealized identity he has created as his goal. Lonoff... ...sentative of a larger group, concept, or commodity. This fracture first promoted by her writing is a source of both hope and agony. Amy seeks meaning from inwardly her fragmented existence. Where Nathan is brought to the edge of this discovery as the novel progresses, Lonoff retreats from it. Literature is adept at describing and cultivating a fragmented sense of identity it can motivate others to actions/extremes never sought by the author. Put simply, art encourages interpretation. As writers, each of these three characters is aware of the fact that unity or singularity of interpretation is rarely (if ever) achieved. When as well as applied to an individual identity such interpretive freedom/ambiguity can be the source of both strength and despair. The notion of self, though mayhap less whole by the end of the novel, still houses a potential for meaning.