Elegy or Ode: The Life Narrative in Philip Roth's Everyman

The fear of death that haunts Everyman in Philip Roth's Everyman endows the fiction a sense of melancholiness. Although mourning life's fugitiveness and fragility takes a significant part in Everyman's whole span of life, meditation on the immortality of life is also the key factor that helps him to view death in a peaceful way. When he becomes old and begins to reflect on the past, Everyman not only gets aware of the theme of love in his life that had been overlooked for so long, he also finds out the mistakes in his past outlook on life, which pays too much attention to biological life. His meditations in the Jewish graveyard and his dialogue with the gravedigger prompt him to get an insight that only by forging spiritual life and social life into one's life, can one have the capability to "resist" death. In this way, this "elegiac" fiction gradually becomes an ode to life, and the life narrative in this fiction is thus manifested.