Everyman

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Front cover of the 2006 American first edition

Everyman , German Jedermann , is a novel published in 2006 by the American writer Philip Roth .

He describes the life of a family man and successful art director, who looks back on his life during his innumerable hospital stays and, as he gets older, begins to regret his missteps in the face of transience. Essential aspects of life such as family, affection and the feeling of security are becoming more and more important, while time slips like sand between his fingers.

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The protagonist, who comes from a Jewish family and whose name remains unknown to the reader until the end of the novel, seems to lead a happy life. But neither the love of his parents, the affection of his family nor his career as an art director can satisfy him. Soon he sees his marriage as a prison cell and the desire for something new and more attractive makes him live in an illusory world. His existence based on lies results in three broken marriages and the hatred of his two sons and turns out to be the real cause of his loneliness. He tries to suppress this overwhelming consciousness through painting courses in the senior citizens' residence, but illness and loss begin to dominate his everyday life more and more and make him more fragile than ever before.

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Secondary literature

  • Victoria Aarons: Philip Roth's Everyman and the Ironies of Body and Spirit . In: Xavier Review 27: 1, 2007, pp. 116-127.
  • Thomas Austenfeld: Only Sensations Remain: The Hypertrophy of the Aesthetic in Philip Roth's Everyman . In: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 20, 2007, pp. 207–21. doi : 10.5169 / seals-100068
  • Hana Wirth-Nesher: Everyman and Nemesis in Newark: Philip Roth, Hebrew, and. American Writing. In: Jane Roberts and Trudy L. Darby (Eds.): English Without Boundaries: Reading English from China to Canada . Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle 2017, pp. 168–177.

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