Circles and Heroes

The beginning of Phillip Roth's American Pastoral begins with the Swede. Then it becomes about the Swede's brother, Jerry, his sort of violent antagonist. Then it becomes about the narrator, in a more focused way, since the whole story is invariably about the narrator's perceptions of these two brothers. Finally it becomes about the book that seems to connect and yet divide the narrator from the Swede. Literature that is self-referential is so satisfying. The improbable journey of the chapter ends with a smile.

Ultimately, the chapter is about how people interpret their lives through icons. The ten-year-old narrator idolizes the Swede and can only interpret the other characters in his life through his worship of the Swede. Therefore, Jerry is necessarily formed in reaction to his brother, and the most important thing is how the Swede reacts to the Kid from Tomkinsville, not the narrator's own reaction. The chapter is circular. For the townspeople, the Swede signifies a heroic example of innocence and hope during the war.

Here is one of my favorite, and I think remarkable, sentences from the first chapter:
"It was a cheer that consisted of eight syllables, three of them his name, and it went, Bah bah-bah! Bah bah bah . . . bah-bah! and the tempo, at football games particularly, accelerated with each repetition until, at the peak of frenzied adoration, an explosion of skirt-billowing cartwheels was ecstatically discharged and the orange gym bloomers of ten sturdy little cheerleaders flickered like fireworks before our marveling eyes . . . and not for love of you or me but of the wonderful Swede. "Swede Levov! It rhymes with . . . 'The Love'! . . . Swede Levov! It rhymes with . . . 'The Love'! . . . Swede Levov! It rhymes with . . . 'The Love'!" (Roth, 2)

This sentence has such different moods and such sudden changes in energy. The first description of the cheer, "eight syllables, three of them his name..." and the bahs are so clinical, the choice of sound to beat out the rhythm of the cheer so boring, that the cheer sounds more like a resentful dirge. This has a sense of the narrators voice, a worship that is so ordinary to him it is at once boring, and yet reverential. After the exclamation point, the tempo of the sentence picks up in accordance with the cheer. The first three clauses of the sentence feel like a recollection in absentia; after the exclamation point, the flashback is fully realized. We are transported to the center of the football-fan crowd. This transportation and build-up are achieved through a cascade of clauses. The prepositional phrases and commas cause jarring interruptions in the sentence flow, building to the explosion of cheerleader skirts. The cartwheels seem to discharge from outerspace, appearing on the field like fireworks in the sky. The actions of the cheerleaders are disembodied, and the movement of their skirts fuctions as a metonym for the whole of their performance. The language, "explosion" and "discharged" has a violent connotation, again linking the Swede's success in sports to the war being fought in the outside world. The sentence finally ends oddly, with "not for love of you or me..." as if cheers are supposed to celebrate the lowly crowd rather than the exceptional athlete. The many clauses of the sentence, and its two contrasting moods, require the reader to constantly go back to understand the sentence as a whole. When the words of the cheer are finally revealed, the reader must go back to the "bah" syllables in order to get the rhythm of how it is cheered.