Word: axlerã
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...magic. The impulse was spent. He’d never failed in the theater, everything he had done had been strong and successful, and then the terrible thing had happened: he couldn’t act,” it begins. The novel’s central crisis, Axler??s loss of the ability to act, becomes a symbol—thin though it may seem—for a world coming apart at its very fabric. “The Humbling,” Roth’s thirtieth book and his fourth novel in as many...
...three-act structure and its otherwise bare narrative that alternates predominantly between dialogue with Axler and his inner-monologue, could essentially serve as an allegory for Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. The entirety of the novel, from Axler??s time in a mental institution following his breakdown, to his affair with a 20-years-junior lesbian family friend named Pegeen Mike (after a character in Synge’s “Playboy of the Western World”), and his final projection fantasy and eventual...
...overtly intellectualized conceit. Pegeen’s reversion from lesbianism, rather than providing the sufficiently developed emotional component that would complicate the novel in an engaging way, merely serves to mix and match psychoanalytic tropes through progressively convoluted and prop-oriented sexual encounters. She becomes a symbol for Axler??s diminished potency, literally wearing a symbol of phallic power during their lovemaking, and his realization of that fact does little more than render it explicit; “They drove home with Pegeen’s hand down his pants. ‘The smell...
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