Date Published:

Abstract:

Why might Philip Roth, in 1980, have published a revised edition of The Breast (1972), and what do many of his emendations have to do with recent scholarly disclosure of the existential concerns of the original narrative?  How, moreover, in the second edition, does de facto co-authored narrative technique pertain to Sartre’s tenet that consciousness arises as an upsurge of nothingness amid the dross substance of non-reflective Being? I conclude that in the revised edition Roth imbues David Kepesh, his once-autonomous narrator, with levels of authorial cognizance that subordinate Kepesh’s early outlooks to the consciousness-usurping intrusion of the author — now the author-narrator. That act of domination may dramatize Sartre’s description of the existential “look,” which stands to usurp the consciousness of “the Other.” The act of thus revising an already existential narrative illustrates the flight of the Sartrian “For-Itself” toward “the higher functions of consciousness.”

October 2019: James Duban is Professor of English and an Associate Dean in the Honors College at the University of North Texas. The author of books about Herman Melville and the Henry James family; he has also published in Philological Quarterly, Philip Roth Studies, Philosophy and Literature, Harvard Theological Review, Literature and Theology, and The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, among others. His current research centers on Philip Roth, Arthur Koestler, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. He has recently, as well, turned attention to delineating the contrast between the heroic past and the conspiratorial present in James’s The Ambassadors.

updated in November 2019

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