American Pastoral

Roth lets us know what his chapter will deal with from his very first sentence.
“The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city's old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete.”
It’s about the character of The Sweed, his significance as a figure in the context of the war, told through the perspective of a school boy in Newark, a common American town. Roth does not want his reader to be lost, instead, he wants to take us by the hand and tell us the story as clearly as he possible can. This long sentence where all the pieces of the puzzle are clauses linked together is his way of telling us that we should view his story as a whole, think of everything at the same time and not as a disjointed series of facts and motifs.
His task then is to weave the plot, the simple suburban characters with his heavier themes and the resonance they have in the context of the war. He uses the character of The Swede as his link, a character that is more walking theme and legend than a real person, an “anomalous face” that would be use to reflect what he wants to say.
The narration of his protagonist is one of that who now has distance from the fact. More than nostalgic, the sentences are trying to make sense of life back then; they attempt to explain something that others who lived it merely forgot.
“It was a cheer that consisted of eight syllables, three of them his name, and it went, Bah bah-bah! Bah bah bah . . . bah-bah! and the tempo, at football games particularly, accelerated with each repetition until, at the peak of frenzied adoration, an explosion of skirt-billowing cartwheels was ecstatically discharged and the orange gym bloomers of ten sturdy little cheerleaders flickered like fireworks before our marveling eyes . . . and not for love of you or me but of the wonderful Swede. "Swede Levov! It rhymes with . . . 'The Love'! . . . Swede Levov! It rhymes with . . . 'The Love'! . . . Swede Levov! It rhymes with . . . 'The Love'!"
Roth builds his sentences from being analytical to grounded in a powerful sensation he wants to share with us. He plays with the distance of the narrator, at times reminiscent, but moving closer and closer to the moment and eventually putting us right there in the sports march in this paragraph. He starts by coldly describing the rhythm of the piece. That sentence achieves two things- it gives the narrator distance from the scene. If he’s breaking down the cheer, then he’s not merely living it. But it also puts the rhythm in our head, so that when we get to the actual cheer, we’re right there in the moment. The narrator then suddenly becomes our narrator too, we were engulfed in the cheer- he backed out and allowed the moment to be.
His voice reappears in the second paragraph, starting with “Yes,”- this sentence structure choice, the yes and the comma, goes back the narrative voice and pulls us out of that scene he sat us in. W e go back to his statue of a character, who time and time again serves a s a bridge. The Swede is, after all, how we get to his brother, who by contrast is fiercely human.

The Uncanny

Far from clinical, Freud’s rhetoric engages the reader in a tone that does not report, but rather explains (sometimes casually) what he’s trying to say. This is a voice fascinated with its own subject, one that thinks on the page and holds the reader’s hand through what may otherwise be much to obscure.
There’s a clear distinction between an “I” and a “we”- I, Freud am telling you what’s known until this point, we shall explore together from this point on.

“I know of only one attempt in medico-psychological literature, a fertile but not exhaustive paper by Jentsch (1906). But I must confess that I have not made a very thorough examination of the literature, especially the foreign literature, relating to this present modest contribution of mine, for reasons which, as may easily be guessed, lie in the times in which we live; so that my paper is presented to the reader without any claim to priority.”

Freud as an “I” is established early on in the reading, but not until after a disembodied couple of brief paragraphs, were the subject of the essay is introduced from a much more foreign and impersonal point of view. It is only until Freud interrupts the general discussion of the uncanny with this bit of opinionated background information that we as readers identify a guiding voice.

By the second section, the investigation becomes “our own”.
The plural, however, does not mean a suppression of Freud as an authority in the essay. He suspends sentences with clauses like “and I hope most readers of the story will agree with me”, this is still his idea (“I will show you”, Freud says)

Freud then does not beg for the reader to believe him, it’s not a tone that begs with understanding or agreeing from the reader, it’s one that assumes it.

“It only remains for us to test our new hypothesis on one or two more examples of the uncanny.” Halfway through the second section, his idea is our idea.

Freud is like a school teacher, with the authority of his singularity, the “I”, comes the assumption that the reader is on the same page, that there’s no skeptical student that needs to be persuaded.

The professor approach comes in his literary analysis, where he first uses the story of the Sand Man to get us on board with him. Literature is used as the bride between famous psychoanalyst and the public.

The long plot summary just emphasizes the need for synchrony between writer and reader, though it never begs for it.

We, as readers and Freud and guide become a solid team by the third section, where we analyze the “creative writer” (a third, distant party) together.