Nathan Zuckerman has been the distinct narrator-protagonist in Philip Rothâs Zuckerman novels, starting from The Ghost Writer (1979). Different from the previous eight novels, Exit Ghost (2007) portrayed Zuckerman as an author, ill and senile.
Coming back to New York city after his 11-year rural seclusion in search of medical cure, Zuckerman found he was a âno longer,â no longer fit in the technologically-wrapped urban milieu, no longer following contemporary literary taste, and even failing to maintain what he used to be. More acute suffering is while his desire was ignited by a young but married woman, he no longer possessed the body to enact his passion. The âno-longerâ correspondence between oneâs body and desire or mind gives rise to the re-configuration of the ethical relation, not only in love, in friendship but in writing.
Suffered from the impotence and incontinence, Zuckerman went through ethical difficulties marked by the idea of the body, the inevitable helplessness of old age and sickness. Corresponding to Emmanuel Levinasâs idea of the radical passivity in face of the other as well as the embodied ethical subject, the ethical relation in Exit Ghost is worth-exploring in that the ethical responsibility implied a predicament when others made inescapable the corporeal declining and disabilities and requested a different ethical edge or possibility. That is, responding to others is one thing, but to preserve the sense of selfhood is an-other. The reading of Rothâs Exit Ghost is like the extension of the loop of Levinasâs ethics in which the other was put ahead of the consciousness of the self, the ipseity. The other half of the ethical loop presented in Exit Ghost was a situation in which the self was radically passive and vulnerable in face of oneâs own body as the Other.
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