Portnoy's Complaint is also emblematic of the times during which it was published. Other topics touched on in the book include the assimilation experiences of American Jews, their relationship to the Jews of Israel, and the pleasures and perils the narrator sees as inherent in being the son of a Jewish family.
The title also alludes to the common literary form of complaint, such as " A Lover's Complaint", which typically presents the speaker's comments on being a spurned lover. Portnoy's Complaint: A disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses perpetually are warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature . On the first page of the novel, one finds this clinical definition of "Portnoy's Complaint", as if taken from a manual on sexual dysfunction: Portnoy is "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor", and the narration weaves through time describing scenes from each stage of his life every recollection in some way touches upon his central dilemma: his inability to enjoy the fruits of his sexual adventures even as his extreme libidinal urges force him to seek release in ever more creative (and, in his mind, degrading and shameful) acts of eroticism also, much of his dilemma is that "his sense of himself, his past, and his ridiculous destiny is so fixed." Roth is not subtle about defining this as the main theme of his book.
The novel is set primarily in New Jersey from the 1940s to the 1960s. Spielvogel, his psychoanalyst Roth later explained that the artistic choice to frame the story as a psychoanalytic session was motivated by "the permissive conventions of the patient-analyst situation," which would "permit me to bring into my fiction the sort of intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language that in another fictional environment would have struck me as pornographic, exhibitionistic, and nothing but obscene." Structurally, Portnoy's Complaint is a continuous monologue by narrator Alexander Portnoy to Dr. Time included this novel in its " TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005." Structure and themes
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Portnoy's Complaint 52nd on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel tells the humorous monologue of "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor," who confesses to his psychoanalyst in "intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language." Its success turned Roth into a major celebrity, sparking a storm of controversy over its explicit and candid treatment of sexuality, including detailed depictions of masturbation using various props including a piece of liver. Portnoy's Complaint is a 1969 American novel by Philip Roth.
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