Pursuit of Social Identity in Roth’s The Humbling

Abstract

The thesis focuses on Roth's The Humbling that portrays the life of Simon Axler, the last of the best of the classical American stage actors. After losing his magic of performance, Axler feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot as he enters into the stage; his confidence has waned and performance has drained away. Something fundamental has vanished. Following salient postulations of scholarship of social identity theory, especially social categorization, identity differentiation of Ashforth and Fred Mael, and role-based identity by Burke and Stets the research tries to explain predicament of aging theater artist while finding a social space.

Drawing upon the protagonist’s haunting memories of the past that significantly determine the present struggle of the Alexer, the research assesses that the moments and events Alxer recounts in life and his attempts to suicide and to maintain the life even after knowing his banal failure are the signals that he wants to discover his existence. The novel is not a mere collection of the protagonist’s life. The research tries to characterize the collections as the properties of his life struggle; moreover, it aims at showing that the novel chooses as it focuses the bewildered losses of an ageing actor, a man who, on discovering that he has become a self pretence grounded in nothing.