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Article: Passing as tragedy: Philip Roth's The Human Stain, the Oedipus myth, and the self-made man.(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
- Article date:
- September 22, 2005
- Author:
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Know thyself.
--Apollonian proverb.
Coleman Silk, the septuagenarian Negro protagonist of Philip Roth's The Human Stain, has spent his adult life passing as white. (1) I describe Roth's tragic character as Negro because, given his age, he would have been raised during a time when the term was appropriate. The term Negro also reminds us of race as a social category in the United States, one that has been constructed and reconstructed, designating a group that has moved from slaves, to free but second-class citizens, to full participants (ostensibly) in American democracy. As we know, the Negro (also called colored, then black, and now African American) ...