Abstract

This study reveals the importance for Roth’s Nemesis (2010) of Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). In Roth’s narrative, Bucky Cantor becomes the leviathanic object of his own Ahabian ire for supposedly spreading the polio virus. Narrator Arnold Mesnikoff, on the other hand, grasps the arbitrariness of disease. Arnold’s good cheer and equanimity resonate with Captain Boomer’s outlook in “Leg and Arm” chapter of Moby-Dick, demarcating the equatorial divide between sanity and morbidity.

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