35 pages • 1 hour read
Philip RothThe Human Stain
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Point of View/The Unreliable Narrator
Point of view refers to the person(s) from which information derives in the story. Writers use one or more points of view to shape the narrative in various ways. A first-person narration, for instance, can help bridge the gap between narrator and reader, creating intimacy and trust. If this narrator is unreliable, however, readers remain skeptical about the narrator’s true intentions. Unreliable narrators might have personal reasons for skewing facts and fiction, and authors can also use unreliable narrators to help readers challenge preconceived notions about not only the story and its characters but about the real world outside of the story.
Roth utilizes an unreliable narrator to help challenge readers’ perceptions about fact and fiction. Roth clearly labels Nathan Zuckerman as the official narrator of the novel, but the narration consistently slips into other characters’ points of view (including but not limited to Lester, Faunia, and Delphine). This signifies the subjective nature of truth and knowledge. What one character believes to be true is not necessarily objective fact. If the reader accepts Nathan as a reliable narrator, then the points of view from other characters’ perspectives are a product of Nathan’s imagination, and, as a result, not necessarily true. There are also facts that Nathan can’t possibly know on his own, meaning that Nathan guesses at some facts and, in his own words, uses his imagination to understand other events. Nathan’s unreliable or incomplete narration helps readers understand a central theme of the novel: It’s not possible to know everything about everyone; what a person might find out about someone they thought they knew, such as Nathan learning that Coleman was in fact Black, can upend previously held assumptions.
Metafiction and the Role of Writing
Along with point of view, the act of writing is a motif throughout the novel. When the act of writing is an acknowledged motif like this, it is known as metafiction. At its basic definition, metafiction is writing about writing. There are, however, different forms of metafiction, and there are different techniques involved as well. For the purposes of Roth’s novel, the two major metafiction techniques that Roth utilizes are: a story about someone writing a story and commenting on a story while telling it. Nathan, who happens to be a writer, receives a request from Coleman to write the story of his scandal and subsequent retirement. Coleman himself wrote notes about his scandal and even drafted a book. Both Nathan and Coleman engage in metafiction by being two protagonists in a story about writing a story. Both of them also comment on the story while telling it. Nathan is telling the story of events after they’ve already taken place (after Colemans death), thus underscoring that he is commenting on the story while telling it.
Authors have different reasons for using metafiction, some of which include self-reflection, humor, or poking fun of writers and/or the writing process in general. In The Human Stain, writing symbolizes creating knowledge and truth by creating evidence. Coleman keeps boxes of documents and composition notebooks full of writing about the college scandal. Coleman asks Nathan to write the story of the scandal, giving credence to the art of writing and its importance in culture. Key plot points occur through the act of writing: Delphine writes Coleman an “anonymous” note; Steena writes Coleman a letter, after running into him; and an anonymous person writes an obituary for Faunia. Writing occurs throughout the novel when characters have something unspoken that they are desperate to express.
Roth emphasizes Nathan’s role as a writer in the final scene with Lester. Even Lester understands the importance of the role of the writer, the ever-present observer who is going to capture the event or events in words.
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