ABSTRACT
The Human Stain (2000) closes with an image of an insane veteran fi shing on a frozen lake of solid, white ice. He is watched from a distance by writer Nathan Zuckerman. Beneath the romantic glaze of the ice, black waters rumble disconsolately, vented only by the crack incised by the ex-Army man. The lake could be taken for a symbol of America. It is also a symbol of the blank, white page, the writer’s canvas. The battle-scarred veteran at the end of the twentieth century is himself a scar upon both-inhibiting and inhabiting the consciousness of the American nation and the American writer. Les Farley is a reminder of the demise of the American pastoral, infl icting his post-traumatic stress disorder on those he encounters. When Zuckerman leaves him at the Berkshire mountain top, Farley lingers, a fi gure hovering over the wound in the ice, dangling his rod in the unsettled dark waters that, in the context of the story, are representative of black America and its smothered, simmering history.
