Philip Roth's The human stain and the destruction of the American dream

Abstract

The paper dissects the notion of the American Dream in Philip Roth's The Human Stain. It looks at how individual tenets of the Dream are carved into the protagonist Coleman Silk, a black man who goes through life pretending to be white. The analysis shows how these same principles are questioned through various incidents in Silk's life and ultimately by his violent death. The result of Roth's scrutinizing is that, as all the underminings come together, the whole concept of the American Dream is symbolically crushed.

Keywords

• American literature / literary studies