Portnoy's Complaint

One of Alex’s childhood memories involves taking a trip to the bathhouse with his father. He describes in meticulous detail how his father would rub him down with a towel while surrounded by older, naked men. For Alex, the trips are a form of induction into Jewish culture and Jewish Identity. By taking the trips with his father, he is taking part in a ritual that goes back many generations, surrounded by men who passed through the same cultural ritual and who were initiated into the same community. Here, Roth establishes genitalia as a symbol of that tradition and community. Alex remembers this as a primary example of the Jewish community because he was confronted unexpectedly with the raw reality of Jewish men. He saw unknown men naked for the first time, and his first thought was to compare his body to theirs, thereby comparing his ethnic identity to theirs. To Alex, every non-Jewish culture remains clothed and unknowable while he feels the Jewish men are almost too well known. This tension is indicative of Alex’s feelings toward Jewish culture and community. He knows that he is a part of it but he dislikes being confronted with the reality of it. Instead, he is constantly reminded of his own Jewishness to the point where he comes to resent it and to the point that he tries to lose himself in other cultures. However, Alex cannot escape his own Jewish identity, no matter how hard he tries.

Alex struggles to distinguish between religion, ethnicity, and cultural identity in Judaism. Whether he’s going to the bathhouse or watching Jewish sports teams, Alex is an active participant in his Jewish community in his early life. Still, he feels stifled by his Jewish identity—both within the community and because of the antisemitism he experiences from non-Jewish people—and he struggles to find himself outside of this identity he feels has been imposed on him. Alex becomes an atheist as a way of rebelling against his parents. He develops an interest in communism for the same reason, searching for a way to establish an identity that contrasts with his parents’ identities. No matter what he believes, however, he can never find a way to stop being Jewish. His ethnic identity as a Jewish man remains constant, whatever he chooses to believe. This constancy is represented throughout the text by Alex’s nose, an inherited, immutable feature that he feels singles him out as Jewish.

Alex’s feelings toward his mother are very complex, and his focus on her in his monologues reinforces the book’s theme of Psychology and Anxiety. Mentioning his mother in this context immediately calls to mind Freud’s Oedipal Complex and the cliché that all psychological trauma can be traced back to one’s mother. Alex veers between platonic adoration, mutual respect, unresolved sexual attraction, and hatred when discussing his mother. He loves her and he resents her in equal measure, though he says more about this to his therapist than he would ever say to his actual mother. The complexity of their relationship drives the nonlinear narrative, as anecdotes about other people frequently come back around to things his mother said or did. This includes hazy boundaries around privacy in his childhood home, such as seeing his parents undressed and his mother putting on her stockings in front of him. As his mother’s overbearing nature interferes with Alex’s compulsion to masturbate, his feelings toward her become intertwined with his thoughts and feelings about sex. As he grows older and finds new outlets for his sexual desires, these feelings only become more complex. His desire to discuss this matter constantly with the therapist suggests that Alex knows that the issue is unresolved.