ABSTRACT
Philip Roth has linked American Pastoral and I Married a Communist as parallel demonstrations of how difficult it is to escape immersion in and definition by one's historical moment, how easy to become a historical casualty. "I found", says Roth, "that dealing with a very important, powerful decade in American life, the Vietnam years, enabled me to write in ways I hadn't written before. American Pastoral is, however, about more than what happened to this country in the sixties. The expulsion of Swede Levov from "Paradise Remembered" is also "every man's tragedy" because it involves discovery of "the evil ineradicable from human dealings". One might plausibly argue that if the country had not been at war with the Communist regimes of North Korea and China, the whole panoply of McCarthyite outrages in the name of anti-Communism-the blacklists and political dismissals that play so large a role in the novel-might never have occurred.
