Character Study I: “The Swede as he had always known himself… evaporated, leaving only self-examination in his place.”

The Swede: Seymour Levov

The protagonist of American Pastoral is a high-school legend, a demigod of the hallways– someone the narrator, Nathan ‘Skip’ Zuckerman, remembers with more than fondness– his admiration is so intense that when he sees him at a baseball game years later his companions tell Nathan he looks as if he’d met Zeus. When Nathan thinks of the Swede, he thinks of “the Swede’s great fall and of how he must have imagined that it was founded on some failure of his own responsibility. There is where it must begin,” Zuckerman says, “It doesn’t matter if he was the cause of anything. He makes himself responsible anyway.” This is the Swede: the modest hero, the man who accepts responsibility and, throughout the book, gives himself away for other people’s gain. He did it in high school by being the star athlete, letting people feed off of his talent and success; he did it with his wife, giving her his all and working his hardest to make her happy; and he did it with his daughter Merry, who he considered a part of himself, as much as that strong right arm or that often-talked-about handsome face, and she destroyed him. And believes, for a major part of the book, that it is his fault.

Zuckerman tells us that the Swede has “been doing that all his life, making himself unnaturally responsible, keeping under control not just himself but whatever else threatens to be uncontrollable, giving his all to keep his world together”. So it would make sense that when Merry blows up the general store, when Merry kills a man, when Merry runs away and when Merry converts to Jainism and even when Merry tells him she was raped that the Swede immediately identifies the cause of all this as “a transgression”; more specifically, his transgression.

The Swede is deceptively self-destructive in this way, and Roth makes it exceptionally easy to pity him for it. There is something undeniably and achingly familiar in the character of the Swede, this really nice guy, this man who, incredibly, blames himself for not being able to control the world around him. “The disaster that befalls him”, Zuckerman decides, “begins in a failure of his responsibility, as he imagines it.” And we see that the poor Swede does blame himself, multiple times– and that’s unfair, but who else could it be?

Nathan ‘Skip’ Zuckerman

Although not a main character of the story by any means, Nathan Zuckerman is the man who introduces us to the Swede in the first section of the book, ‘Paradise Remembered’. He is at first a fierce admirer of the Swede; he is a writer who looks back on the high school hero as if he was the only person in the world who mattered in those four years. When he meets the Swede for dinner after receiving a letter from him saying that the Swede wants Nathan’s help writing something about his father– for a great shock had befallen him– Nathan is disappointed. He keeps trying to come up with reasons for the Swede’s normality. He tells us that “perversely, my attempts to come up with the missing piece that would make the Swede whole and coherent kept identifying him with disorders of which there was no trace on his beautifully aging paragon’s face”. Later, he asks himself: “Why clutch at him? What’s the matter with you? There’s nothing here but what you’re looking at.”

But it is important to realize that Nathan did clutch at the Swede– so much that when he meets the Swede’s brother Jerry at his high school reunion, he immediately asks how the Swede is doing– and when the answer is “dead”, and Jerry tells him about Merry and the pain and the suffering and the catastrophe that was Seymour Levov’s life, Zuckerman thinks about it for weeks. He starts imagining it. The entirety of the rest of the book is what the imagines the Swede’s life to have been like.

We see Zuckerman, then, as someone who is a deep thinker, almost an obsessive thinker– a man who wants very much to understand, and when he can’t immediately comprehend something he has to delve into it, by whatever means possible, and figure it out. This is the reason he read the Swede’s favorite book in high school, the reason he thinks of a line from John Keats when he remembers a pretty girl he felt special fondness for, the reason he tells the Swede’s story– it is all, in effect, an effort to understand the most confounding puzzle in the world: human nature.