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of her breasts. The news leaves Kepesh
aghast.
For Kepesh, sex is, above all else, "the
revenge on death." But with old age and
illness pressing on them, what revenge
can either character salvage now?
Agitated and bereft, Kepesh spills out
this tale in a non-stop dramatic mono-
logue, to an unnamed listener. Were he
identified, I suspect this listener would
turn out to be none other than the fic-
tional character Roth has called his
"alter brain," Nathan Zuckerman. The
same Zuckerman who listened patient-
ly, and at length, to the main characters
in the three novels that immediately
preceded this one.
And, in the same way that American
Pastoral, I Married a Communist and
The Human Stain each examined the
impact of a particular historical-social
movement on its characters, so too,
does The Dying Animal.
Kepesh, the cultural critic, considers
himself both pioneer and product of

only lead to folly. Indeed, seen through
his son's eyes, Kepesh is nothing more
than an absurd, pathetic, aging lecher.
Ultimately, Kepesh's nihilism can no
more free him from emotional pain
than unlimited sex can spare his (or
Consuela's) body from death. Kepesh's
world without boundaries has become
a world of boundless agony.
Seeking something, perhaps some-
one, to hold onto, or to connect with,
the libertine Kepesh becomes a prisoner
of his own obsession, a captive to a hol-
low passion, for a cancerous, dying
piece of human tissue.
Thus, it seems to me (in an interpre-
tation that is not spelled out but strikes
me as implied), we arrive at where we
— or rather, Roth — began, in The
Breast, with David Kepesh driven to the
mad delusion that he has been trans-
formed into a giant female breast.
Some readers, perhaps many, will be
offended, even disgusted, by Roth's
explicit sexual descriptions in The Dying

From "The Dying Animal"

I was no longer in that phase of my life when I thought I could do
everything. Yet I remembered it clearly. You see a beautiful woman. You
see her from a mile away. You go to her and say, "Who are you?" You have
dinner. And so on. That phase, when it's all worry-free.
You get on the bus. A creature so gorgeous everybody is afraid to sit next
to her. The seat next to the most beautiful girl in the world —'and it's
empty So you take it. But now isn't then, and it'll never be peaceful.
I was worried about her walking around in that blouse. Peel off her jack-
et, and there is the blouse. Peel off the blouse, and there is perfection. A
young man will find her and take her away. And from me, who fired up
her senses, who gave her her stature, who was the catalyst to her emanci-
pation and prepared her for him.
How ,do I know a young man will take her away? Because I once was the
young man who would have done it.

the sexual revolution. He views himself
as a self-made hero who has freed him-
self from all of society's rules, unbound
himself from all emotional claims.
Having abandoned his wife and then
8-year-old son decades before, Kepesh
goes so far as to advise his unhappy,
estranged by now 40-year-old son to
abandon his wife and children, too. Get
rid of "the standard unthinking" and go
"beyond the blackmail of the slogans
and the unexamined rules," Kepesh
admonishes. Romantic love is a m yth,
he insists; attachment and intimacy have
no meaning beyond a momentary cou-
pling; to think otherwise is to be a fool.
But Kepesh's story reveals a different
set of truths: that, taken to its extreme,
freedom without bounds becomes
chaos; liberty without restraint yields
recklessness; and such recklessness can

Animal. But Roth's intent is not only to
make us uneasy with his character's sex-
ual pathology, but to force us to con-
front our own unexamined desires.
The challenge is not an easy one to
meet. Unable to reconcile himself to
the dead-end (perhaps literally) to
which his pursuit of the sensual has led
him, Kepesh finds himself consumed
by madness and obsession.
He consoles himself with the lines by
Yeats from which this bleak tale takes
its title: "Consume my heart away; sick
with desire/And fastened to a dying
animal/It knows not what it is; and
gather me/Into the artifice of eternity."
Unlike the unfortunate character he
created, however, but fortunately for his
readers, Philip Roth has chosen to be
consumed instead by the enlivening
madness of art. ❑

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