Outrage (novel)

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Outrage (English original title Indignation ) is a 2008 novel by the American writer Philip Roth . The German translation by Werner Schmitz was published by Hanser Verlag in Munich in 2009 .

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The 19-year-old first-person narrator Marcus Messner, law student and the only child of a Jewish kosher butcher, feels overwhelmed by the suddenly erupting paranoid "worry" of his father that something bad could happen to him only through the smallest mistake. Marcus evades his father by transferring from college in his native Newark to Winesburg College in rural Ohio . Now even more focused on learning and top grades, he feels compelled to change rooms twice and closes himself off from the student groups that are usual in Winesburg. He only makes an important new acquaintance with the depressed student Olivia Hutton, who makes a fellatio on her first and only date and surprises the sexually inexperienced Marcus with it. As a result, he learns that Olivia has apparently already slept with several students and is unsettled by the sexual experience, whereupon he ignores her. Later he writes her apologetically and confesses his love to her, but then Olivia doesn't want to see him anymore.

His behavior attracts the Christian conservative Dean Cauldwell, who summons him to his office. In their dispute, the hypocrisy of the dean's “concern” through Marcus' argumentative and moral superiority is revealed step by step for what it really is: a perfidious interrogation that reflects the spirit of McCarthyism and aims to discourage any approach of non-conformist behavior break. A point of contention with the dean is Marcus' staunch atheism - which he backs up with quotes from Bertrand Russell's Why I'm Not a Christian - and his refusal to attend church visits, of which at least forty must be completed in the course of your studies. Marcus is later persuaded by Sonny, a popular Jewish student from a wealthy family, to place another student as a "substitute" who, for a fee, signs up for Marcus at church services.

The excited Marcus vomits in Cauldwell's office, shortly afterwards his appendix becomes infected and has to be removed. His mother visits him in the hospital and tells him that she is toying with the idea of ​​divorcing the increasingly paranoid father. Olivia also visits Marcus in the hospital - but Marcus' mother demands that he break the relationship when she realizes from Olivia's scarred arm that she has attempted suicide . When Marcus returns from the hospital, Olivia has left and no one can or wants to tell him anything about her whereabouts. He therefore visits Cauldwell, who tells him that she has suffered a nervous breakdown.

One night in Winesburg, during a heavy snowstorm, there were fights among the boys, who then attacked the girls' houses and stole their panties. Troublemaker leaders are expelled, despite real and legitimate fear that if expelled from college they will be called up for the Korean War . Marcus also fails in the end because of a comparatively small mistake - as his father had always warned him - his dizziness during church visits is exposed and since Marcus does not want to apologize for it, he is expelled from Winesburg. What happens to him is what the first-person narrator Marcus tells the reader after just a quarter of the reading: a quick, cruel and senseless death in war, surrounded by blood and bones like in his father's butcher's shop.

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Structure and narrative idea

The almost 200-page text is divided into two chapters ( Under Morphine , Out and Over ) of very different lengths, supplemented by a historical note that notes that the old rules of Winesburg were abolished with the student unrest in the late 1960s. In the second, full five-page chapter, one learns - now through an authoritative narrator - that the first is to be read as a kind of intoxicating memory, which the brain of the unconscious, doomed Marcus performs under the influence of morphine injections, which not only as Pain suppressors, but also act like memory fuel.

Roth took over the fictional place Winesburg from Sherwood Anderson's 1919 novel Winesburg, Ohio .

Genre and title

Outrage has basically all the typical characteristics of a novel . This concerns, among other things, the strong focus - on the protagonist, the central conflict and a dominant, tightly woven motif (slaughter-death-blood-knife / blade ...) - as well as the dramatic basic structure. In terms of structure and effect, the work unfolds like an ancient tragedy . It results from a certain complicity in his own downfall and from the fatefulness of the constructed event. In this regard, in addition to the Oedipus motif (escape from the father's “curse”, which is precisely what makes it all the more tragic), especially the eponymous, proud and fateful word outrage is charged with meaning: Marcus learns it in elementary school as part of the know and sing the Chinese national anthem - usable against the common enemy of the war, Japan; the rebellious spirit of the song carries him through the second, and for him the last, of the Christian sermons (the students have to attend church services at least forty times before graduation) as well as through the subsequent discussion with the dean; and at the end of his short life he hears it from the mouths of those who created it and now turn it against a new enemy.

Rating

The indignation that is transmitted to the compassionate and rebellious reader draws its strength precisely from the fact that - although only the past is told and no actualization is sought - it essentially aims at what is today and potentially what is always possible. After the conspiracy against America - according to one of the critics - this is the second book in which Philip Roth takes stock of the Bush era , here now by negotiating the second fundamental flaw of his presidency: piety that has become totalitarian and becomes social compulsion ; To make matters worse, the current Obama frenzy should not forget that, with the world of Sarah Palin, religious insanity [...] was surprisingly close to grabbing power .

radio play

  • Outrage , radio play, translated from English by Werner Schmitz, director: Norbert Schaeffer , Der Hörverlag, Hamburg 2011 2 CD, 88 min.

filming

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gustav Seibt: America in Hell . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of February 3, 2009.
  2. ↑ The sons die before their fathers in: FAZ from July 30, 2011, p. 30.