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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in American Pastoral, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Heroes, Legends, and Myth-Making
Family, Responsibility, and Duty
The Irrationality of Suffering
The Unknowability of Others
American Ideals
Summary
Analysis
“Let’s remember the energy,” Nathan Zuckerman’s speech begins, opening with Nathan’s fond memories of the prosperity his neighborhood experienced after the end of World War II. He describes an end to rationing, men who returned to the workforce and who “demanded more and went on strike for it.” Nathan and other boys his age would play softball on Sunday mornings. Still, the parents of the community clung to an “undercurrent of anxiety”—they’d experienced periods of hardship in the past and knew that things might not always be so good, and they pushed their kids to succeed and hold tight to the values and principles they’d grown up with. It was a truly amazing and remarkable time to be alive.
Nathan’s speech casts America in the years that immediately followed World War II as a utopic land of mythic possibility and optimism. Implicitly, he sets up this vision of a past America in contrast to the America of his present (in the novel’s present, 1995), which lacks the optimism and potential of the America in which Nathan and his classmates came of age. Throughout the novel, Nathan and the characters he writes will grapple with what brought about this change—and if perhaps a distinct change even occurred at all, or if it is perhaps more a consequence of his and others’ idealized longing for a past gone by.
Themes
This was the speech Nathan didn’t deliver at his 45th high school reunion—indeed, he only begins to write it after the reunion, in order to work through some feeling that came over him there. Something “unite[s]” Nathan and his classmates—a “new ease” they came into as they got rid of anxieties about fitting in with Gentiles that their parents continued to foster.
That Nathan writes this speech only after he has returned home from his reunion suggests that perhaps something happened there to inspire him to dwell on the “new ease” his generation grew up feeling in the glory days that immediately followed the war, though exactly what inspired him to write remains a mystery for the moment. His emphasis on assimilation into the mainstream culture of America’s Gentiles further points to the novel’s concern with American ideals and what they represent to different characters.
Themes
Nathan muses that if he were younger—30 or 40, maybe—he might not have thought much about the reunion afterward. But it’s different at age 62, only a year after his own cancer surgery. At the reunion, he and his former classmates reminisce. Every attendee receives a commemorative mug, which contains half a dozen rugelach, made by one of their classmates. Nathan scarfs them down on the eight-hour drive home and thinks of Proust’s Marcel thinking of death as he tastes a bite of a madeleine.
Nathan’s musings suggest that his more advanced age and his recent cancer surgery, both reminders of his mortality and of the passage of time in general, have prompted him to be so reflective about his high school reunion. This passage thus points to some of the variables that shape the myths we tell ourselves about our lives and our paths. In Nathan’s case, the looming threat of death causes him to look back on his youth and the past with more fondness than he otherwise might. The detail of Proust’s Marcel eating the madeleine is a reference to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, a novel that similarly deals with the passage of time and mortality.
Themes
Nathan thinks more about death, and of anxiety about death. Now, his graduating class has 20 peers who have died. At the reunion, he encounters Mendy Gurlik, a former troublemaker who Nathan was sure would end up in prison someday. Instead, He finds that Mendy is “simply a retired restaurateur.” Nathan tells Mendy he still looks good—and it’s true, Mendy is tan, trim, and well dressed. Mendy agrees he takes care of himself, but he laments the shame of having to stop to relieve himself multiple times on the short drive there. He turns to the “In Memoriam” page of the reunion booklet and notes two classmates who died of prostate cancer within the last three years. Mendy urges Nathan to get tested twice per year, and Nathan keeps it to himself that he no longer has a prostate.
Nathan’s hypothetical speech makes more sense knowing how heavily thoughts of death weighed on him from the moment he arrived at his high school reunion, when he was greeted with the unsubtle “In Memoriam” page in the reunion booklet. Nathan’s lie about having his prostate removed stems from embarrassment and shame, perhaps, but his silence also emphasizes the book’s broader interest in the unknowability of others. People lie or otherwise conceal the truth all the time, and so it’s hard to get to the bottom of who they are or why they do (or don’t do) the things they do.
Themes
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Nathan also sees Ira Posner at the reunion. He hardly recognizes Ira at first—time has not been kind to Ira, who walks with a limp and wheezes when he breathes. Ira compliments Nathan’s father, who in the brief time they spent together when Ira was a child made Ira feel better about himself than his own father had his entire life. Ira’s own father hadn’t pushed Ira to succeed, and in general Ira felt he had “lived in dark place with those people,” referring to his family. He had a brother, Eddie, who had to be institutionalized and later had a lobotomy. It was something Ira wasn’t supposed to talk about. He grew up to be a psychiatrist, he tells Nathan now. Nathan, for his part, still can’t really place who Ira is.
Ira Posner’s admiration for Nathan’s father, however perplexing it might be to Nathan, points to how heavily the stories a person tells themselves can shape their understanding of the world and inform what they remember and what they forget. Not feeling adequately supported by his own father, Ira found in Nathan’s father the care and belief he needed to thrive. This relationship mattered a great deal to him, and so he remembered it. Ira’s tragic admission about his younger brother’s mental health issues further points to the unknowability of other people—every family, it seems, has its own unhappy secrets.
Themes
The reunion continues. Nathan overhears Mendy and some other men talking lasciviously about the women in their class they used to masturbate to in high school. Now, the women don’t look so good. It’s only after dinner, strudel and coffee, and more crass banter that Nathan realizes that Jerry Levov is among the crowd.
Mendy’s crass words about the women in their graduating class brings Nathan and his peers down to earth. Though Nathan has idealized the world in which he and his classmates came of age, and though he has romanticized their generation, in fact they’re all just aging, crude humans. The appearance of Jerry Levov here ends the chapter with a cliffhanger, leaving readers to wonder whether Nathan will learn more about the Swede now through his younger brother.
Themes
