47 pages • 1 hour read
Philip RothPortnoy's Complaint
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met”
Content Warning: Portnoy’s Complaint depicts antisemitism and an attempted rape.
The novel begins with a description of Portnoy’s Complaint, a medical disorder named after Alexander Portnoy. Those with Portnoy’s Complaint find that their extreme (often perverse) sexual desires are at war with their ethical and altruistic impulses. The description is written by the protagonist’s psychoanalyst, Dr. Spielvogel.
In a session with his therapist, Alex Portnoy describes how his mother is “so deeply embedded in [his] consciousness” (5) that when he was in school, he believed that all his teachers were actually his mother in disguise. He was so convinced that his mother had the magic power to transform into other adults and was always evaluating him that he became very honest and intelligent. His father is a perpetually constipated, self-loathing, Jewish insurance salesman who wants his son to achieve the success that he never could. Though he tries to take pride in his work, his customers don’t respect him. Alex believes that, like “so many Jewish men of his generation” (7), his father serves his mother, his sister, and—in particular—Alex himself. Alex remembers playing catch with his father and being disappointed with his father’s complete lack of sporting ability, but he was unable to express that disappointment to him. His mother was the opposite; when he was a child, she was a very impressive woman who cooked, cleaned, and took care of her two children. Her meticulous, occasionally competitive housekeeping led her to clean the dishes even after the family’s African American maid had already done so.
When Alex disappointed his mother, she would lock him out of the apartment. He would ruminate on his behavior, unable to remember what minuscule mistake he made to anger her. Alex’s mother would tell him that the family did not need him anymore; she could not love a child who misbehaves. Alex remembers hammering on the double-locked door, desperate to be forgiven and allowed back in the apartment. In response to these punishments, Alex would refuse to eat his dinner. His mother would sit beside him with a long, stainless-steel bread knife and ask him whether he wanted to be “weak or strong, a man or a mouse” (11).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Whacking Off”
Alex explains to his therapist how his adolescence was mostly spent masturbating. He masturbated as often as four times a day: at school, at home, at social events, and—using a liver from a butcher shop—on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson. When he was 13, he left the dinner table and rushed to the bathroom so often that his mother was convinced that he had diarrhea. His constipated father complained that he monopolized the bathroom while his mother demanded to know why he was ill and quizzed him about his diet. His mother warned him that eating too many french fries would make Alex sick.
Alex recalls how his father pressured him to learn a musical instrument and journalistic shorthand. He remembers the family vacations at the beach, where he floated in the sea like his father. Alex talks to his therapist about his mother and father’s relationship, recalling how his mother told his father that Alex “goes after school with Melvin Weiner and stuffs himself with French-fried potatoes” (19). His mother’s constant fussing filled him with a sense of guilt about everything he ate and “all that jerking off” (20). These days, Alex only returns home once a month. His mother and father still seem to him to be “the outstanding producers and packagers of guilt in our time” (20). He still feels like he is living “in the middle of a Jewish joke” (21).
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Portnoy’s Complaint is bookended by the only two instances in which Alex is not talking. At the beginning of the novel, a short epigraph provides a medical description of Alex’s diagnosis, which Dr. Spielvogel coins as the titular Portnoy’s Complaint. With this, Roth immediately establishes one of the book’s themes: Psychology and Anxiety. This medical condition, in which a patient’s sexual desires are in constant tension with their moral and ethical concerns, drives the narrative forward. In his sessions, Alexander Portnoy wrestles with his innate struggle to satisfy his sexual urges without compromising his morals. This struggle is another of the novel’s major themes: Sex and Shame. That the condition is named after Alex suggests that he is, in some way, unique. However, this is not necessarily the case. Throughout the novel, Alex‘s descriptions of sexual urges, repression, and shame are evident in other characters. The privilege of having a condition named after him may not please Alex since he already feels terribly and shamefully unique. Rather, the medical disorder being named after him likely fuels his raging anxieties. Placing the definition of this disorder at the beginning of the book sets the tone for the reader: Alex is both a neurotic man and, because of these neuroses, able to find slights and insults in even the simplest of gestures.
While Alex sees similar issues in those around him, Alex exists at a cultural, intellectual, and educational point in history where these tensions can be described in earnest. Alex lives in a specific social context: He spends his adult life in the United States during the sexual revolution, a period in which the traditional boundaries of sex were being broken. Such topics became de rigueur in mainstream society. By the 1960s, psychoanalysis was also a mature discipline. Because of this, Alex is able to find a therapist and is aware of many of the practice’s central tenets. Alex is part of the first generation of young men who have the education and opportunity to talk at length about their concerns. Everyone else suffers in silence.
Alex’s father is introduced through his constipation. This constipation is a significant way in which Alex is different from the generations that precede him. If Alex’s generation is just the first with the tools to express their neuroses using medical language, then his father’s generation is equally afflicted but lacks the social and educational frameworks to reflect on their conditions. As a result, everything gets stored up inside until it becomes the definitive aspect of their existence. Alex’s father’s constipation is not just physical. Like Alex, his emotional state is an extension of existing in a certain time and place. He does not talk about his feelings in the way his son does, so everything is bottled up and unresolved. Unlike Alex, he is emotionally constipated, whereas Alex practically has verbal diarrhea. Neither man is necessarily happy; they are simply unhappy in different ways.
Alex also introduces an important structural tool in Parts 1 and 2: the idea of a joke. He structures his story like a joke, providing the setup with his lived experiences as context, and then delivers the punchline, which is whatever absurd behavior or situation he believes derives from these experiences. Alex complains about his life being like a joke, but at the same time can only explain his life using the structure and format of those very same jokes. The concept of jokes also speaks to Alex’s self-loathing and anxiety; he worries that he is constantly the butt of the joke and that he sticks out in some way, for example, for his sexual appetite or his Jewishness. At the same time, he consistently makes himself the central figure in his stream of jokes; he complains that he is living inside a joke and then tells a joke about his life. This repeated structure shows that Alex is trapped in a prison of his own neuroses.
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