Is It "Good-for-the-Jews or No-Good-for-the-Jews"?: Philip Roth's Registry of Jewish Consciousness

In the short story "Eli, the Fanatic," one of Philip Roth's early pieces, we find the prototype for many of Roth's later characters, a Jew deeply ambivalent about his history and identity, so much so, in fact, that he is not even sure whether he has an identity or a history outside the limited confines of his own unconscious desire to manufacture both. And so, Roth creates his protagonists's double, an ironically insistent reminder of the failure of self-invention.