American Pastoral

In the aftermath of the bombing, the Swede tries desperately to find the rational cause for Merry’s apparently irrational act. Tracing the history of Merry’s childhood, he latches on to two incidents: a seemingly harmless kiss that he thinks, in retrospect, might have been too intimate and news footage of a Buddhist monk’s self-immolation. Both incidents, he fears, may have traumatized her in the long term, the wounds lying buried for years until the Vietnam War drew them out in the most violent way. The Swede’s search for politically neutral explanations for Merry’s explicitly political actions is evidence of The Fragility of the American Dream. He has devoted his life to the American dream, and he cannot accept that Merry’s denunciation of that dream has any validity. As a result, he seeks the roots of her behavior in psychoanalysis rather than in politics. A universe without order is a terrifying prospect, and the Swede cannot accept that Merry’s violence exists in a vacuum. There must be a reason, but the reason cannot be that the American promise really is as empty or as predicated on violence as Merry says it is. Desperate for reasons that don’t threaten his belief in America or his core identity as an American success story, he even considers the possibility that the universe is punishing him for his perfect life, exacting harsh retribution to balance the scales.

Even as a young child, Merry probes the moral ambiguity she sees around her, looking for clear answers. Horrified by the burning monk, she asks, “Is it a sin to take your own life? How can the others [bystanders] stand by and just watch? […] Where has their morality gone?” (156). Her later actions—including both the bombings and her adherence to a suicidally rigid form of Jainism—reflect that search for moral clarity, a goal the novel suggests is just as illusory as the American dream.

Merry’s single act of violence is a microcosm of the turbulent 1960s, an era that saw political assassination, a brutal (and televised) war, and a generational schism that tore families apart and led to one of the greatest moral panics in American history. Roth describes the 1967 Newark Rebellion, a four-day period of armed confrontation between Black residents and local police in which 26 people died. Roth distills the violence into a single, anecdotal event: the Swede and his Black factory forewoman, Vicky, guarding the Newark Maid factory against vandalism, with Vicky acting as liaison between the protestors and the Swede, whom they see as just another rich, white capitalist exploiting the Black population. In this single, solitary vigil, the Swede is confronted again by a world that makes no sense to him. He has kept his factory local (despite lower labor costs overseas), he treats his employees with dignity, and he therefore believes their rejection of systemic injustice should not apply to him. The starkly different worldviews of the Swede’s generation and those of Rita and her cohorts are laid bare in these confrontations. The Swede—an all-American athlete, a US Marine, and a patriotic play-by-the-rules businessman—is confounded by the protests, his confusion turning to anger. His identity is predicated on Craftsmanship as a Moral Virtue, and he is thus angry at his employees for what he sees as shoddy work—failing to understand that, as wage laborers with no ownership stake in the company, they don’t benefit from the quality of their work as he does. Frustrated, he considers relocating to Eastern Europe (and therefore validating Merry’s worst accusations about him).

The Swede and Dawn both find their sense of self challenged by events beyond their control, and they deal with The Elusiveness of Identity in very different ways. The Swede does what he has always done: Shoulder every burden that falls across his path without outward complaint. He sees it as his solemn duty to his father and grandfather who did the same. The generational obligation runs deep, and the same work ethic and quality of craftsmanship that the Swede insists upon in his gloves informs his burden of debt to everyone around him, except himself. This strategy, however, is less effective than it once was. As he tries in vain to understand Merry’s choices, and as he tries to keep afloat in a culture and an economy he no longer understands, he finds himself floundering, less certain than ever of who he is and how he fits into the world around him. Dawn, meanwhile, looks around at her life and realizes that it doesn’t look much like the life she once envisioned for herself. Her 170-year-old stone house feels more like a tomb to her than a home. Her involvement in the Miss America pageant, which she entered in pursuit of scholarship money, has taken over her identity, causing others to see her as a former beauty queen and nothing else. She undergoes plastic surgery, hoping a new, younger face will allow her to build a new life free from the pain of her past. In her attempt to recapture her youth, Dawn also hopes to recapture a moment in time before Merry became “disagreeable.” It may be that Dawn is remembering a time that never existed, a rose-colored past that conveniently ignores the warning signs of her daughter’s dissatisfaction. While Dawn seems content to forget the past, the Swede is bent on revisiting every moment in his attempt to find meaning.