Abstract

In his memoir Patrimony, might Philip Roth have aligned a Jungian, universal unconscious with Heideggerian resoluteness but evaded cognitive demise via the Sartrian flight of the For-itself inherent in writing? I argue that such concerns pervade the narrative and stand related to what Roth elsewhere calls "the struggle not only to infuse fiction with mind but to make mentalness itself central to the hero's dilemma—to think … about the problem of thinking." In Patrimony, such thinking spans synchronistic occurrences across time.