Presentation of Portnoy’s Complaint

Phillip Roths Portnoys Complaint is a part of a cultural question of the 1960s, a raucous mans story of his sexual obsessions, the engagement of a son who has been dominated by his sm new(prenominal)ing mother and attempts to uncoer his anxieties through masturbation. This story became famous overnight, receiving both wide acclaim and contempt. Roth is describe as a product of the 1950s, the last decade in business relationship when education, family values, high glossiness and high principles were still held in esteemuntil dismantled by the sexual and psychedelic revolution that followed.There are leading light similarities between Portnoy and Roth himself, and the debate whether the brisk is a thinly veiled register still ensues among literary critics. A particular type of Jewish imagination can be traced to the activities of Portnoy. Such humor, which features so prominently in the novel, has been effectively identified as a separate kind by Sigmund Freud, who wrote that Jewish jokes were usually directed inwards and characterized by profound self-criticism.The protagonist in Portnoys Complaint confesses that his entire life reminds of a Jewish joke, although it is not a joke. Thus, Alex Portnoy seems incapable of escaping any of the downsides of his cultural predicament. Immediately after the give-and-take was published, the novel quickly acquired a scandalous flavor, and Roth had to cope with a ring of newly acquired celebrity which he despised so much. This hymn to self-stimulation and waiver of repressed sexuality got reflected in both social sciences and popular gloss of Roths era. Shades of Portnoy can be seen in Woody Allens films.Portnoys Complaint was attacked multiple times by the Jewish company for ridiculing their culture and heritage. Norman Podhoretz and Peter Shaw used their positions as editor and cogitate editor of the conservative Jewish journal, Commentary, to revile at Roths allege hatred of Jewish history and identity. H owever, the most scathing vilification of the novel came in 1972 from Irving Howe in an essay titled Philip Roth Reconsidered, who accused the author of Portnoys Complaint of lack of taste, vulgarity and, above all, homeliness.Despite its central thematic preoccupations, which appear to be embattled Jewishness and masturbation, the novels popularity can be explained by the universalism of the issues author strives to explicate, much(prenominal) as the growth and decay of hulky cities, the difficulty of reconciling the sex urge and the love urge over time, and the painful need to outgrow nonpareils parents. While many literary influences can be traced in the novel, by far the greatest and the most important is that of Sigmund Freud.The views on Freuds theory of psychoanalysis as expressed by Alex Portnoy are interestingly controversial on the one hand, Freud is often alluded to as a source of wisdom on the other hand, Portnoy seems to implicitly blame Freud for trivializing comple x human relationships by his excessive and exclusive focus on sex. Essentially, the revolt against parental authority was very typical of the decade the hippie culture, hitchhiking, and experiments with mind-altering substances were all manifestations of this revolt.Like many of his contemporaries, Alex struggles for his right hand to be bad, together with the entire generation that won the right to misdemean for their descendants. In this struggle, at that place were many obstacles Portnoy had to overcome, mostly of internal psychological nature, such as the fear of retribution, especially in the form of castration. It is necessary to disgrace that Portnoys Complaint is a perfect illustration of the notion that belles-lettres cannot be fully understood without immersion into the cultural realities of the age when a certain work was created.Subtly autobiographic, the novel ought to be analyzed ground on knowledge of Philip Roths own life and background. Although critics conc ur that there are notable differences between the loving and caring family Roth grew up in and oppressive and neurotic parents of Alex Portnoy, beyond reasonable doubt, Roths experiences with the mainstream American culture and the opposite sex have been reflected in the novel.