Philip’s Stamps Symbol Analysis

Philip’s stamp collection represents the desire to protect that which cannot be protected. Philip, the narrator and protagonist, is only seven years old at the start of the novel—and as news of rising anti-Semitism and fascist sympathies in America begin to reach him, he internalizes and reacts to the threat very differently than the rest of his family. While Philip’s parents, Bess and Herman, express concrete worries about violence or threats against their family, Philip feels a nebulous sense of uncertainty which manifests as a desire to protect his precious stamp collection. Shortly after Charles Lindbergh secures the Republican nomination at the end of the first chapter of the novel, set in June 1940, Philip has a nightmare so intense it catapults him out of bed. Upon waking, he remembers a terrible dream in which he saw all of his stamps defaced with large black swastikas. Philip’s stamps, then, emerge as a symbol of the desire to protect what’s precious—and the fear of being unable to do so.

Further, Philip’s stamps are a symbol of his obsession with Americana and his belief that the emblems of his country—images of its past leaders and national parks, images which every good American knows by heart—are sacred. When Lindbergh’s candidacy (and eventual ascent to the presidency) brings simmering anti-Semitic sentiments throughout America to the surface, Philip realizes that as a Jewish boy, his status as an American is conditional—he is not, according to the fascist anti-Semites who soon hold political and social power in America, as American as his Gentile counterparts, and he must learn to reckon with that terrible fact at a young and tender age. Philip fears the “malignant transformation” of his stamps throughout the novel, and in this way, his anxiety about the stamps’ wellbeing serves as a method of deflecting his fears about his and his family’s safety and capacity for “transformation” into something unrecognizable. Later on in the novel, when Philip loses his stamp collection while running away from home, Roth uses the loss of the stamps to symbolize Philip’s loss of faith in the value and virtue of America as a whole.