How to Read Philip Roth, or the Ethics of Fiction and the Aesthetics of Fact

From the novel's inception to the present day, its history has been marked by a blurring of the line separating fact from fiction. Although it is as hard to imagine that Plato did not see elements of the philosopher he had become in the discourses of his teacher as it is that Shakespeare did not see himself in the furious uncertainty of Hamlet or the dignified departure of Prospero, the question of an author's personal expression and imaginative identification arises on a different level and to a different degree in the novel—and no exploration of this theme has been so prominent, so revealing, or so strange as that of Philip Roth.