New Historicism

Nemesis

by: Philiph Roth

Synopsis 

It tells the story of Bucky Cantor, at 23 a freshly minted phys ed teacher and summertime playground director. Life’s dealt him some blows: his mother died in childbirth; his father, a thief, exited the picture long ago. Worse, to his anguish and disgrace, Bucky’s poor vision keeps him from going to fight the Germans alongside his best buddies — alongside, for that matter, “all the able-bodied men his age.”

But life’s dealt him blessings, too, prominent among these the grandparents who raised him: the immigrant grandfather who encouraged him “to stand up for himself as a man and to stand up for himself as a Jew,” and his grandmother, a “tender­hearted little woman” with whom he is living in their tenement flat when the story begins. He has a girl he loves, prospective in-laws thrilled to welcome him into their family and solid aspirations of becoming a high school athletic coach. He’s blessed, too, with an awareness of his blessings, a sense not only of gratitude for them but also of the obligation they confer, and it emerges that this sense of obligation is what allows him to withstand his disappointments; indeed, to flourish within his circumscribed world.

He inhabits the role of playground director with a combination of enthusiasm and dignity that makes him, in the eyes of the children, “an outright hero,” and Bucky’s goals are no less exalted. “He wanted to teach them what his grandfather had taught him: toughness and determination, to be physically brave and physically fit and never to allow themselves to be pushed around or, just because they knew how to use their brains, to be defamed as Jewish weaklings and sissies.”

The school playground becomes Bucky’s Fort Dix, his Normandy landing. And when a polio outbreak hits the city, his sense of duty swells: “This was real war too, a war of slaughter, ruin, waste and damnation, war with the ravages of war — war upon the children of Newark.”

Too decent to relish the chance to serve on the front lines of this battle, too honest not to acknowledge his own fear, Bucky rises to the occasion as best he can, which is to say with seriousness, compassion, bewilderment and anger. Not the sharpest of Roth’s protagonists (he lacks introspection, possesses “barely a trace of wit”), he has an appealing capacity to apprehend happiness. Given its pall of war and disease, “Nemesis” is surprisingly dense with happiness — a happiness that’s ever-tenuous, and the sweeter for it. The word “happy” crops up immoderately throughout, and happiness is made manifest in stirringly specific moments (eating a peach on a hot night, observing a butterfly sip sweat from bare skin). The architecture of Roth’s sentences is almost invisibly elegant; not only doesn't one notice the art, one barely notices the sentence, registering instead pure function: meaning, rhythm, intent.

Criticism

Roth’s Nemesis can be fitted in New Criticism, for the reason that; the author’s cultural background as well as the reader’s might affect the interpretation of the text. The situation during those times when Roth wrote the novel influence the outcome of the entire text like when Bucky’s ideologies factored on how he trained the children not to be a Jewish weakling but they must prove that they can out stand others and the  wild spread of poliomyelitis which killed numerous Jewish children. His eagerness to serve despite of how dark his past might be, and the poorness of his eyesight never pushed him to quit the life’s game.