Main Article Content
Abstract
The relationship of Alexander Portnoy who is the protagonist of Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy Complaint is critically analysed from the psychoanalytical perspective. His search for power is not power-seeking for its own sake. His sexuality has been his sole sphere of autonomy in family life as a child. It now becomes the means of the assertion of his independence. It is his only way out. Yet he is enmeshed by the definitional constraints of his background, but in an inverted form. Just as it was in order for his family to eat pork in the Chinese restaurant, because the Chinese are excluded from the WASP establishment and therefore are bereft of power in relation to the Jews, so it is that Portnoy is uninterested in sex with the non-powerful-the Hawaiians and Alaskans. His independence resides in the act of intercourse with the powerful.