earticle

영어

This paper is to examine the double consciousness of Jews in Philip Roth's Operation Shylock (1993). This novel revolves around the ironic use of doubles and postmodernist bluring of the boundaries between fact and fiction, all related from Roth's particular Jewish perspective. He developed his art of impersonation into Operation Shylock's most excessive and audacious form. In Operation Shylock, subtitled with "A Confession", Philip Roth, author, insists that "it is not truth, but fiction." The novel describes an adventure in which Philip Roth, who is the main character of the novel and the same name with author, encounters Philip Roth, an impostor who claims himself as the novelist. The struggle between them, enacted mainly in Jerusalem, involves much verbal argument and soliloquy about the past, present, and future of the Jew, and it is full of controversial. As some critics said fiction is a world made of words, Roth wrote Operation Shylock in this manner with words. From this, we can see that he created the double consciousness of Jews, which is Zionism to build a new country in Jerusalem with the greatest hope for Jews in the past, and the Diaspora to rebuild a country in Europe through the history of Jews on the earth. We can also see he wrote it by using the main character Shylock in The Merchant of Venice written by William Shakespeare as a parody for metafiction, which is fiction itself, that is, fiction with self-consciousness.