Philip Roth Studies

This article suggests that Zuckerman's purported understanding of Coleman Silk—that racial secrecy is his motivation to pass—is illusory. Absent "internal" evidence about motivation, Zuckerman's biography is grounded instead in a vision of Coleman as a fully committed and persevering artist who dedicates himself both to creating his life and to shaping its interpretation, analogous to the novelist's struggle to conjure a fictional world. It is in this sense that race evaporates, not because Coleman succeeds in erasing it, but because Roth permits Zuckerman to construct Coleman in his own image as solipsistic artist. Zuckerman's imagined conception valorizes individualistic self-invention over racial politics.