Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

This is the chronicle of Alexander Portnoy's "jewish joke" of a life. The book is a collection of memories chained together by their relation to one another in Portnoy's mind rather than the actual chronoligal order of events. In doing so Roth creates a stream of consciousness type narration which allows the reader to effectively question Portnoy's sanity. Alex begins to display an intense belief that he will someday be exposed for his perverse crimes and that the exposure will come in the form of headlines in all of the major newspapers. He is especially obsessed with the crimes he has supposedly committed against his girlfriend revealingly nicknamed "Monkey". This exposure is the pervading theme of the novel which initially illustrates a form of irony in that the entire book is essentially a printed confession of every crime and every perverted thought he has. This is the exposure he fears and the one that we beleive he is essentially embracing as the novel progresses it is only at the end that we realize that he is not in fact speaking to his doctor, in fact the "punch line" is that the therapy session has not even begun.