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.