Engaging the Question of Palestine in Philip Roth's The Counterlife
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes2000.9.1.2Keywords:
Arabic-English StudiesAbstract
The paper argues that in Philip Roth’s novel, The Counterlife (1988), which engages the question of Palestine, the author’s attempt to introduce a balanced view of the Arab-Israeli conflict is undermined by a narrative strategy that favors the victor and deprives the victim from entering the text except as a non-person or a decadent oriental. An application of what Edward Said calls “contrapuntal reading” to Roth’s text reveals that the author’s tendency to offer a neutral presentation of the Middle East issue is thwarted by a hegemonic master narrative - originated in Orientalism and Western imperialism - that either removes the Palestinian subaltern out of the fictional text or conflates him with a status of cultural inferiority and barbarism by assigning him a role which conforms to his image in the colonial taxonomy of inferior races..