








































© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expositions 2.2 (2008) 189–211] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.189 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Grasping the “Raw I”: Race and Tragedy in Philip Roth’s 
The Human Stain1

LydIA MoLANd

Department of Philosophy 
Colby College

“Practical identity” in philosophical literature signifies the set of commit-
ments that define a person’s ethical life: commitments to family, to country, 
to a profession, or to a cause that a person must fulfill in order to have integ-
rity and act ethically. It is a commonplace that some roles that generate com-
mitments are inherited: we do not, for example, choose many of our family 
roles, our national identity, or our race. Whether we are responsible to norms 
within these unchosen roles is already a vexed question as we contemplate 
practical identity.

Within this subgroup of inherited roles, we find an additional complica-
tion. A society’s conventions determine to a large extent whether an inherited 
role subjects the individual who inhabits it to injustice. Being a daughter, for 
instance, does not necessarily subject one to injustice. But it can if the norms 
around being a daughter involve less education, less freedom, and more  
responsibility than the norms involved in being a son.

The situation is even more complex with race: while the status “daughter” 
exists independently of social norms, “race,” depending on whom you ask, 
may be a complete social construct to begin with. Regardless, race is certainly 
something we in our culture inherit. We do not just inherit it the way we 
inherit hair color; we often inherit it as a role, as coming with its own set 
of expectations and norms. The same thing applies, then, to race as does to 
“daughter”: depending on the society in which you live, your racial identity 
can subject you to injustice. Unfortunately, in American society, being of 
a racial category other than white has frequently entailed deep, wrenching 
injustice.

It seems intuitively unfair, then, to imagine that an unchosen, perhaps 
completely constructed and unjust role could generate ethical obligations. To 
put it another way: it would seem impossible that violating norms generated 
by such a role could itself be unethical. How could refusing to participate in 
an unethical scheme be unethical?



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In this paper, I will use Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain to probe this 
question and others. What claim, if any, can an unjust social convention 
such as racism make on an individual’s practical identity? Can unjust insti-
tutions make loyalty to disadvantage ethically obligatory? Thinking of race 
in this context, I will claim, challenges assumptions about autonomy and 
ethics that are at the crux of our experience of ethical life. I will also argue 
that The Human Stain is a tragedy. Roth’s language and plot themselves sug-
gest this; more important for my purposes, Roth’s novel can also be parsed  
according to philosophical theories of tragedy. In arguing for its philosophi-
cal significance, I will primarily refer to the Hegelian tradition of tragic analy-
sis, a tradition that frequently associates tragedy with attitudes towards social 
roles and with social upheaval.2 Hegelian analyses of tragedy also character-
istically highlight questions of agency and freedom: Roth’s portrayal of his 
protagonist ultimately challenges, I will argue, contemporary conceptions 
of freedom, specifically those entailed by the American dream. Roth’s novel 
highlights this conception of freedom as particularly self-deceptive and as 
having enormous tragic potential. In challenging us to recognize the tragic 
potential at the heart of our society, Roth warns us, I think, that we ignore 
this potential at our own risk.

The “Raw I”
The Human Stain features Coleman Silk, described as a precocious teenager 
growing up in 1930s New Jersey who discovers an early passion and aptitude 
for the classics. overcoming disadvantaged origins, he becomes a successful 
college professor, scholar, and dean at prestigious Athena College. But Cole-
man’s success is at the price of a betrayal of self and family: Coleman is black, 
but light-skinned enough to “pass” and so to take advantage of the upward 
mobility offered to white men of his generation.

Coleman grows up in a predominantly white neighborhood and excels at 
school, following his father’s example of how to live a dignified life as a black 
American. But his father dies during Coleman’s first year at Howard Univer-
sity. Coleman’s first year had not gone well: in a Washington, d.C. Wool-
worths, Coleman has been called a nigger for the first time; at Howard itself, 
he has seen himself as a Negro for the first time, and he finds that he wants 
neither. Roth’s narrator, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, reports:

Then he went off to Washington and, in the first month, he was a nigger and 
nothing else and he was a Negro and nothing else, and he wasn’t having it. No. 
No. He saw the fate awaiting him, and he wasn’t having it.…you can’t let the 



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big they impose its bigotry on you any more than you can let the little they 
become a we and impose its ethics on you. (Roth 2000, 108)

With the vertiginous realization that, if he does not say he is black, stran-
gers do not generally assume he is black, Coleman resolves to grasp “the raw I 
with all its agility.” He decides to choose to be white, to shed his burdensome 
identity as a black man once and for all. He “was Coleman, the greatest of the 
great pioneers of the I.” He is now free on the big stage “to go ahead and be 
stupendous. Free to enact the boundless, self-defining drama of the pronouns 
we, they, and I” (Roth 2000, 109). Tellingly, Coleman sees the deception he 
is about to practice as part of his new, powerful self: “Self-knowledge but con-
cealed,” he says. “What is as powerful as that?” (Roth 2000, 108). Coleman’s 
body has betrayed him in placing an obstacle between him and the life he 
wants to lead; but its betrayal has not been thorough enough, allowing Cole-
man to practice betrayal in return.

I think that we can absolutely endorse Coleman’s refusal to allow the “big 
they to impose its bigotry” on him. Part of the vice-like grip of racial identity 
is that one usually cannot simply walk away from it the way one can (theo-
retically) walk away from or hide a religious, political or sexual identity that 
might limit one’s life chances. Coleman’s luck in being able to walk away 
from the injustices of racism and realize his potential should, theoretically, 
be cause for celebration. His refusal to let the “little they become a we and 
impose its ethics on [him]” might make us flinch a bit: a struggling black 
community needing his talents does not in itself generate obligation, but his 
callous dismissal of this community seems intemperate. And what are we to 
make of someone who wants to be a pioneer of the I?

our discomfort intensifies as Coleman embarks on a lifetime of decep-
tion and betrayal necessitated by his decision to be white. He approaches the 
afternoon in which he tells his mother he is abandoning her for the white 
world the same way that he approaches the boxing matches he wins with such 
ease and style. His break with her is complete: he is not about to replicate 
his body’s half-hearted betrayal and so never sees her again. When strangers 
guess his ethnic identity, they tend to guess Jewish; he allows this mistake to 
take root, then marries Iris Gittelman, a Jew whose “sinuous thicket” of curly 
hair has a chance of accounting for his children’s probable hair type. In the 
moment in which he announces to his mother his intention to abandon her, 
“there floated through Coleman the eerie, crazy fear that all he ever wanted 
from Iris Gittelman was the explanation her appearance could provide for the 
texture of their children’s hair” (Roth 2000, 136).



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As he and his wife begin their family, Coleman prays that his children’s 
bodies not betray his betrayal of his own family. Two sons and then twins, a 
boy and a girl, are born. All four look convincingly Jewish, and Coleman’s 
relief is explicit: “The family was now complete. They’d done it–he’d made it. 
With not a sign of his secret on any of his kids, it was as though he had been 
delivered from his secret.” Elated at this deliverance, he almost confesses his 
secret to Iris, resolving to “present his wife with the greatest gift he possessed: 
he would tell the mother of his four children who their father really was. He 
would tell Iris the truth” (Roth 2000, 177). But he is saved, or at least pre-
vented, from making this confession by watching Iris react to the crisis of a 
friend whose husband had secretly fathered another family. Iris’s description 
of the betrayal elicits one of Coleman’s many analogies to Greek tragedy. Her 
friend, Iris reports, compares learning of the other family to finding corpses 
buried under the floor. “yes,” Coleman responds, “it’s like something out of 
the Greeks. out of The Bacchae.” “Worse,” Iris says, simultaneously cutting 
his aggrandizement down to real-life size and intensifying it, “because it’s not 
out of The Bacchae. It’s out of Claudia’s life” (Roth 2000, 179).

Warned off by Iris’s fury on behalf of her friend, Coleman considers him-
self saved “from the most childishly sentimental stunt he could ever have 
perpetrated” (Roth 2000, 179). years later, Iris dies never knowing that her 
husband was black—this despite, as Zuckerman tells us, the fact that this 
information would not have bothered her in the slightest. Not, anyway, at 
the outset of their courtship.

one of Coleman’s children, Mark, obsesses about family history and  
resents Coleman’s lack of information about where exactly in Russia Cole-
man’s grandparents immigrated from. years later, Coleman rehearses the  
recurrent conversation with his son in his mind: “‘Where did our great-
grandparents come from?’ Russia. ‘But what city?’ I asked my father and 
mother, but they never seemed to know for sure. one time it was one place, 
one time another. There was a whole generation of Jews like that. They never 
really knew” (Roth 2000, 176). Mark rebels against Coleman’s nominal (or 
actually, though Mark does not know this, fake) Jewishness by becoming 
orthodox. one of the most unforgiving moments of the book depicts Mark 
saying Kaddish over Coleman’s grave, the ancient words conveying, as Zuck-
erman puts it, “the sobering message” that “a Jew is dead” (Roth 2000, 314). 
But Coleman was no Jew, and Mark is rendered pathetic in his observant 
grief. We are reminded at the book’s end that it is still possible that one of 
Coleman’s children will conceive a child whose appearance will expose Cole-
man’s secret. But with Coleman’s death in the book’s final chapter, there will 



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be no one to offer an explanation for an unusually dark skin tone. There will 
only be astonishment, bafflement, and, perhaps, misdirected accusations.

In the figure of Coleman’s older brother, Walt, Roth gives us a parallel life 
against which to assess the ethics of Coleman’s decision. Walt returns to East 
orange after finishing college on the GI bill. In the decades preceding the 
civil rights movement, he fights segregation locally, becoming the first black 
teacher in a white district, then the first black principal, then the first black 
superintendent of schools (Roth 2000, 322–323). We are given Coleman’s 
list of accomplishments in a warped comparison: the first Jewish classics pro-
fessor in the country, among the first Jewish faculty at Athena College, and, 
by the 1990s, its first Jewish dean of faculty.3 The irony reaches an almost 
unbearable pitch when Coleman, late in his career, is accused of using a rac-
ist remark to describe black students. It is the sixth week of the semester 
and the students in question have yet to attend a single seminar. In class, 
Coleman speculates aloud that these absentee students must be “spooks”; he 
wonders, in other words, if they exist. But “spooks” has also a nastier, racial 
meaning, and, unbeknownst to Coleman, the students in question are black. 
When the students, tipped off by their dutifully attending classmates, lodge a 
complaint, Coleman is called upon to apologize. Coleman points out that he 
could not have meant his comment as a racial insult since he did not know 
they were black precisely because they’d never been to class. Ever the professor, 
he produces etymologies and linguistic records to prove that “spook” indicat-
ing a ghost and “spook” as a derogatory term for black people are unrelated 
(Roth 2000, 84). When his explanation is not accepted and he is asked again 
to apologize, Coleman rails against the black anti-Semitism that he asserts is 
to blame. The irony intensifies: Coleman is not a Jew, so his students could 
not successfully be black anti-Semites in this case even if they wanted to be. 
Coleman did not know his students were black; they in turn do not know he 
is not only not Jewish but black. Both their accusation that he is racist and his 
accusation that they are anti-Semites thus strangely misfire.4 But however lu-
dicrous the accusations against Coleman may be, his charging these students 
with black anti-Semitism is yet more ludicrous since he at least, we assume, 
still knows that he is not a Jew. As a result of the “spooks incident,” Coleman 
resigns from Athena College in disgrace. Iris dies shortly thereafter of heart 
failure, and Coleman blames the College for her death. “Creating their false 
image of him …they had killed his wife of over forty years. Killed her as if 
they’d taken aim and fired a bullet into her heart” (Roth 2000, 11).

Although we might want to celebrate Coleman’s escape from the injustices 
of his inherited role, we are left with no ambiguity about the havoc Coleman’s 



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bid for independence has wreaked. His mother dies still broken-hearted at 
her son’s renunciation of her; his sister and brother suffer in different but ago-
nized ways (Roth 2000, 321). There is also the less tangible but no less glaring 
harm done to Coleman’s wife and descendents. Perhaps it is true that what 
you don’t know can’t hurt you. Nevertheless, we cannot escape the sense that 
a grave harm has been done to each of them. Ironically, it is a harm concern-
ing who they are: in his determination to be who he is defined independently of 
his race, Coleman has denied his descendants important information regard-
ing who they are. They are condemned to be unknowingly self-created even if 
they think, as in Mark’s case, that they are upholding heritage by embracing 
inherited roles.

The damage is not only to Coleman’s family but also to himself. His  
adherence to the “raw I” develops character traits in Coleman that reverberate 
through his life, causing estrangement from his children and a disgraced end-
ing to a distinguished career. His refusal to allow his body to betray who he 
believes he is continues in his refusal to accept the decline of sexual capacity 
that comes with his seventy-one years. Viagra enables him to initiate a torrid 
affair with an apparently illiterate college janitor.5 It is his lover’s ex-husband, 
himself suffering from Vietnam-induced post traumatic stress syndrome, 
who kills them both.

Coleman’s refusal to accept the role his physical body gives him compli-
cates our sympathy with him. Coleman seems to feel that his body is once 
again betraying him, this time by aging, by refusing him the sexual prowess 
that he once enjoyed. But it is harder to excuse Coleman’s behavior on this 
front. Aging is an “injustice” we all face, should we be fortunate to live long 
enough; but, as a universal disrespecter of persons, it is hard to think of it as 
an injustice at all. Both of Coleman’s rebellions—against his race and against 
his body—seem to stem from his insistence on the “raw I.” In neither case is 
he willing to be defined by something that limits his idea of who he is. But in 
the case of his body, his defiance seems less heroic and more attributable to 
pride, stubbornness, or intemperance.

I will have more to say about character later; first it is worth confronting 
some of the moral questions that Coleman’s story raises. For all the harm 
Coleman causes to himself and others, with what justification could we say 
that he should have stayed with the black community and experienced all of 
the disadvantages that doing so would have entailed? We might try to im-
agine a middle position: that Coleman stay in the black community—thus 
not betraying his birth family—but, unlike Walt, decline to dedicate his life 
to ending segregation, preferring to pursue a career of his choice. It was part 



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of the evil of institutionalized racism, however, that there could have been 
no such middle position. If Coleman had stayed in the black community, 
his life trajectory would not have entailed becoming a college professor and 
administrator, only minus the activism. His life would have been completely 
different: no graduate school, no professorship, no deanship, no opportunities 
to pursue the literature he loved so deeply. By the middle of Coleman’s career, 
what was unimaginable at its beginning happened: Coleman himself, as dean, 
is responsible for hiring Athena College’s first (let us say) openly black profes-
sor. But that does not change the fact that the wheels of justice were turning 
too slowly for Coleman himself. Justice is individual; justice delayed is justice 
denied. But what to say about an action that, although itself a justified rebel-
lion against radical injustice, generates such betrayal and deception?

I don’t see any way out of finding Coleman’s actions ethically problematic. 
But, given that his wrongs are driven by resistance to an unjust system, how 
do we pinpoint the wrong? We might say: his renunciation of this unjust role 
was not problematic; only the callousness with which he carried it out de-
serves our censure. But would one have been possible without the other? The 
deception and betrayal he practices on his family were arguably necessary to 
the success of the enterprise: likely anyone with less of a strong sense of his 
or her “raw I” would not have pulled it off. When Coleman announces to his 
mother his intention to betray her, she responds by tracing his sense of his 
“I” to infancy: “I don’t know why I’m not better prepared for this, Coleman. 
I should be…. you’ve been giving fair warning from almost the day you got 
here. you were seriously disinclined even to take the breast. yes, you were” 
(Roth 2000, 139). Comparing Coleman’s intolerance of the “big they” and 
the “little we” to Walt’s willingness to fight one in the name of the other, 
Roth’s narrator Zuckerman offers only their respective identities as explana-
tion: “Walt was Walt, vigorously Walt, and Coleman was vigorously not” 
(Roth 2000, 105). There seems, then, to be no explanation for behavior other 
than character. Coleman was born with a sense of the “raw I”: only so can 
he engage in this betrayal successfully. In recounting Coleman’s justificatory 
conversations with himself, the narrator puts the point another way: “don’t 
most people want to walk out of the…lives they’ve been handed? But they 
don’t, and that’s what makes them them, and this was what was making him 
him” (Roth 2000, 139).

We might instead decide that the wrong of Coleman’s actions is in the fact 
that his deception affects people—family members—to whom he owes hon-
esty. Let us imagine for a moment a black man light-skinned enough to pass 
as a white man who has no living family and makes the same decision Cole-



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man did. Let us further imagine that, conscious of not wanting to extend 
the deception to those with whom he has intimate relationships, he does not 
marry and begets no children. Perhaps, as Coleman’s sister herself suggests, 
not having children should have been the price Coleman paid for his lifelong 
deception. But this again seems desperately unfair: why should an appallingly 
unjust social convention determine whether those it oppresses can ethically 
choose to have children or not? Why should one be dependent on the luck, 
if one wants to call it that, of having no living relatives before one can escape 
the institution to begin with?

Indeed, such stories force us to consider the role of moral luck. Most 
of us will not be faced with this kind of oppression; those of us who are 
will not usually also be given an opt-out solution that generates the same 
kind of deception as Coleman’s. In other words, Coleman’s luck in  
being light-skinned enough to pass was the cause of his moral unluck: his 
being faced with a choice very few others would face, and a choice with sig-
nificant moral ramifications.

The Human Stain as Tragedy
Tragedy and Social Roles

I suggested above that The Human Stain is a tragedy. Why should this matter? 
one answer is that Roth himself invites this analysis. The book’s epigraph is 
from Oedipus Rex, and Sophoclean themes of fate and destiny recur through-
out the book. The ageing Coleman finds a letter written to him by a white 
girlfriend of his youth. This girlfriend, upon meeting his family, left him with 
the simple declaration, “I can’t do it,” and with no doubt as to what the “it” 
referred. Coleman reflects that, had she agreed to marry him and raise biracial 
children (knowingly, as opposed to Iris, who unknowingly rears biracial chil-
dren), “he would have lived another life.” Zuckerman continues:

He thought the same useless thoughts—useless to a man of no great talent 
like himself, if not to Sophocles: how accidentally a fate is made…or how  
accidental it may all seem when it is inescapable. (Roth 2000, 127)

Resolving at another point to terminate his relationship with the jani-
tor and live a more humble life, Coleman the classics professor determines  
“[t]o live in a way that does not bring Philoctetes to mind. He does not have 
to live like a tragic character in his course” (Roth 2000, 170). But minutes 
later, infuriated by his son’s moral condescension, Coleman abandons his 
resolve. The affair continues until it ends with bloodshed and disorder on a 
scale that would have made Sophocles proud.6



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Still: why should whether The Human Stain is a tragedy be a matter for phi-
losophers, rather than a matter for literary theorists? I have three answers to 
this question. First, from its earliest instantiations, tragedy has often involved 
reflection on roles, the collision of roles, and the relationship of individuality 
to roles. Hegel’s assessment of the difference between ancient and modern 
tragedy, for instance, is that the ancient Greeks had a limited sense of self  
behind their roles as compared to moderns.7 Ancient Greeks, according to 
this analysis, primarily thought of themselves as instantiations of roles. Trag-
edy resulted when equally justified roles collided and individuals instantiat-
ing those roles were destroyed in the conflict, the collision between Antig-
one and Creon being the locus classicus for this theory. Coleman as much as 
acknowledges that this is the version of tragedy he is resisting when he says 
that he “saw the fate” of the “big they” and “little we” “awaiting him, and…
wasn’t having it” (Roth 2000, 108). Coleman refuses to be reduced to a role 
by either the white or the black community: he insists on being a modern pro-
tagonist with a sense of individuality beyond his roles. This refusal seems all 
the more justified since racism traps in a way more modern and more perni-
cious than the way oedipus, for instance, was trapped by fate. The gods may 
be unjust, but they are gods; their ways are not our ways. Racism is humans 
trapping humans, and in ways all too human.

Modern tragedy, again according to Hegel, does not focus on the clash of 
distinct individuals who represent roles; instead it depicts the individual as the 
ground on which different passions, roles, or beliefs themselves vie for promi-
nence. In Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, we read that, in modern drama, the 
“principal topic is provided by an individual’s passion, which is satisfied in the 
pursuit of a purely subjective end, and, in general, by the fate of a single indi-
vidual and his character in special circumstances” (Hegel 1975, 1206). So, for 
example, Hamlet is both the son of a murdered father and heir to the throne, 
but the focal point of drama in Shakespeare’s play is Hamlet’s inner life, his 
agonizing indecision and tortured self-accusations. In Coleman’s destruction, 
we again  see the roles clash within Coleman himself: his roles as his mother’s 
son and as a black man are incompatible with his desired role as a budding 
intellectual. The last is a role he cannot pursue while keeping faith with the 
first two roles. In The Human Stain as in Hamlet, the individual’s struggle with 
an inherited role is central to the drama’s tension. In Coleman’s case, as again 
in Hamlet’s, the attempt to define the self in the face of conflicting roles drives 
him to undertake actions that eventually destroy him. In its focus on an indi-
vidual’s struggle with roles, then, Coleman’s is a modern tragedy.

But Coleman takes the individual’s struggle with roles to a new level. yes, 



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Coleman is a member of a family, a black man, and a classicist; but he is 
above all else Coleman. Ironically, it is the deceitful Polonius in whose mouth 
Shakespeare coins the phrase, “To thine own self be true”—a dictum that 
Coleman takes as defining a role to trump all other roles. We cannot imagine 
Hamlet, much less Antigone, resolving to act on “the raw I with all its agility.” 
But Coleman does, signaling another modern revision in the relationship of 
individual to roles. Coming from Coleman, this new individuality sounds 
natural.

Perhaps it sounds natural because Coleman is so thoroughly an American. 
In a sense, The Human Stain is a particularly American tragedy. For all Cole-
man is doing is taking the American dream, the idea that you can be whoever 
you want to be, seriously.8 This radical privileging of individuality, I suggest, 
is our contemporary world’s contribution to Hegel’s theory of tragedy. The 
trajectory of tragedy’s evolution, then, would be: ancient tragedy presents 
the clash of roles in the external world; modern tragedy highlights the clash 
of roles within the individual; contemporary American tragedies of a certain 
kind showcase individuals who believe that they can exist independently of 
roles, then find that this belief is in fact unsustainable. In Coleman’s case, his 
belief that he can remain true to his “raw I” by rejecting one of society’s most 
unjust roles causes him to violate basic ethical principles regarding deceit 
and betrayal.9 America itself, by coupling a dream about the “raw I” with 
institutionalized racism, made for him the fulfillment of its dream impossible 
except at a high ethical price. And American society threatens also to destroy 
those who are willing and able to pay that price. The first thing looking at The 
Human Stain as a tragedy does, then, is expose this newer attitude towards 
individuality and its ethical ramifications.

Tragedy and Freedom

The second reason that thinking of The Human Stain as a tragedy matters 
philosophically is that tragedy often turns on conceptions of freedom.10 oed-
ipus tries to work free of the prediction that he will kill his father; Romeo and 
Juliet try to break free of their familial constraints; Schiller’s Karl Moor thinks 
he can construct a new moral order free of traditional norms. Tragedies often 
portray, in other words, flawed conceptions of freedom that inspire the agent 
to fling himself against constraints he cannot, in fact, escape. Looking at 
Coleman’s case as a tragedy invites us then to ask: What faulty or incomplete 
idea of freedom is Coleman pursuing?

The answer, I think, is again in the “raw I” that Coleman embraces with 
such conviction. For Coleman, to be free is to be essentially unencumbered, 



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to be fully undefined by the surrounding world. Freedom is defined by act-
ing only on those desires that one actively chooses and that conform to one’s 
independent conception of oneself. It involves resistance to any kind of  
unchosen influence and the belief that a betrayal of the “raw I” is more ter-
rible than a betrayal of any particular people, norms, or cultures.

This vision of freedom is in fact suggested by liberal theories that emphasize 
choice as the essence of autonomy. It is also often implicit, I think, in Kantian 
views that describe paradigmatic freedom as freedom from all commitments. 
As one such theorist, Christine Korsgaard, puts it, freedom is dependent on 
the rational self being able to shed roles that cannot be reflectively endorsed. 
For her, the real self is the free, unencumbered self, the self defined only by  
itself. It is this free self that I must live up to, to whom I am above all  
beholden, and whom I must not fail.11

I am not the first to suggest that the philosophical idea of the unencum-
bered self as the paradigmatically free self badly serves those who live under 
oppression. When we focus on autonomous choice as the defining factor of 
human agency, we discount the fact that the range of choices open to an in-
dividual may itself be a product of warped social institutions. We also neglect 
the fact that social conditions can corrupt one’s ability to choose well at all. 
When we predicate the idea of autonomy on an individual’s ability to be a 
self above her desires, evaluating and “shedding” components of her identity 
from a universal point of view, we de-emphasize the interconnectedness of 
roles and the fact that shedding one role might enmesh one in actions that 
one no more wants to endorse than one wanted to endorse the original role. 
As Roth’s novel painfully illustrates, those unwanted consequences can be all 
the more agonizing when the roles themselves are based on an injustice.

If it is true that injustice can harm its victims in this way, one moral to take 
from Roth’s novel is trivial: racism is a deep evil. It is systematically, poison-
ously evil because it makes doing things that should be ethically defensible—
for instance, choosing a career that tracks what one loves or choosing to live 
a life free of prejudice—ethically problematic. It traps people into roles that 
are bad for them and stunt them but that they nevertheless cannot shed with-
out perpetrating deception and hurt. of course, this kind of conflict is not 
unique to racism. We often find ourselves forced to compromise our most 
cherished desires for the sake of other roles. But racism intensifies the conflict 
involved in such compromise. I think many of Coleman’s actions are unethi-
cal: he practices callous deceit, shows little regret, continues to deceive long 
after it is unnecessary, and carries the egoism of the “raw I” into situations 
where it is not needed to combat injustice, for instance in his bedroom.12 But 



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much of his unethical action is in response to very bad moral luck: the bad 
luck of living in a society with prejudices against a role he did not choose; the 
ostensibly good luck of being able to escape that role; the bad luck of having 
his rejection require deception and betrayal.13 We must blame Coleman, I 
think, but blame him with the humility that comes with the recognition of 
moral luck. We can blame him but must add: there but for the grace of God, 
perhaps, go we.

on this reading, part of Coleman’s bad moral luck is that his light skin 
invites him to assert a kind of freedom that ultimately destroys him. But 
the agony of bad moral luck is sometimes combined in tragedies with what 
would seem to be the opposite of luck, namely, necessity. It is one of tragedy’s 
standard operations to challenge our faith in our own freedom by exhibiting 
a kind of necessity that appears to crush the individual. This necessity is often 
expressed in the form of irony. Arriving as Thebes’ savior, oedipus is also the 
source of its corroding illness. Attempting to evade a divine prophecy, he 
runs straight into the prophecy’s fulfillment. Blind to the actual identity of 
the man he kills and the woman he marries, oedipus appears at the end of 
Sophocles’ tragedy blind.14

Roth’s plot, as we have seen, trades heavily in ironies.15 Coleman deceives 
his children about their true ethnic identity; one son embraces the identity 
he in fact does not share with his father with a ferociousness that dooms their 
relationship. Having escaped the injustice of one role, Coleman dies caught 
in the conflict between two victims of injustice: a sexually abused women and 
a traumatized veteran. In perhaps the book’s most damning ironic twist, his 
own refusal to be defined by words consumes him: having escaped a role that 
made him the target of racial slurs, Coleman’s career ends when he is accused 
of using a racial slur. The unjust, singular constraints of the words “nigger” 
and “Negro” propelled Coleman out of his first community; the multiple 
meanings of the word “spook” do not save him from being expelled from 
his second. The irony continues: having escaped his society’s earlier racial 
injustice, he falls victim to society’s nascent consciousness of these injustices. 
Convicted finally of the evils of racism (though no thanks to Coleman; rather 
thanks to Walt and others like him), American society in Roth’s portrayal has 
followed the pendulum to its other extreme: despite Coleman’s essentially  
irrefutable evidence that he could not have meant “spooks” as a racial slur, he 
is pronounced guilty by his community and effectively ostracized.16

Another way tragedies depict necessity is in portraying punishments that 
fit their crime: the metaphorically blind oedipus blinds himself; Antigone’s 
throwing earth on her brother’s body sentences her to burial under the earth; 



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Claudius is poisoned by his own poison. Coleman’s crime is to want to be 
only himself, the self without the constrictions of either the “big they” or 
the “little we.” But the character he develops in the process of being only 
himself leads him to do things that ultimately destroy that self.17 His cultiva-
tion of the “raw I” makes his career and his family possible, but it also both 
takes away from him and contributes to the violence and the ignobility of his 
death.18 Coleman dares to evade the prophecy, not divine but just as intrac-
table, that he would, as a black man, live a life of disadvantage. He pays by 
losing both the family and the good reputation his attempted evasion allowed 
him to acquire. The punishment indeed fits the crime. But in Coleman’s case, 
even the punishment leaves us again painfully aware of the original injustice 
that motivated the crime. The motive for his action was not objectionable the 
way that Claudius’ ambition or Iago’s jealousy, for instance, are. Coleman’s 
determination to embrace the “raw I” was, at base, a response to racial injus-
tice he had every right to try to escape.19

Be that as it may, the book’s ample ironies and the fitting nature of its 
punishments seem to mock Coleman’s bid for freedom. They show it up as 
naïve, self-deceptive, delusional. Try as he might, he will not evade the so-
cial web in which he is caught; he will not become unencumbered, and any  
attempts to act as the “raw I” will be punished. Roth’s depiction of Coleman’s 
fateful struggle to become a free, unencumbered self suggests, I think, that 
freedom is more dependent on institutions and conventions than we—often 
wooed ourselves by the American dream and liberal, autonomous visions of 
the self—like to think. Unjust social conventions, in addition to being sim-
ply unjust, can produce a false sense of choice, a distorted sense of self, and 
can foster character traits that intensify the ethical dilemmas that face those 
already oppressed. Roth in a sense makes this point over and over again as 
The Human Stain depicts the havoc wreaked in individual lives by social in-
justice: Coleman’s lover’s chances at happiness are doomed, Roth makes clear,  
because of a lifetime of abuse by men; Coleman’s murderer cannot escape 
what he did in Vietnam while fighting for his country, a country that mocked 
and abandoned him upon his return. We are less free, Roth seems to be say-
ing, than we like to think we are. Acting with too absolute a sense of the “raw 
I” is a denial of this fact, and is a denial, to repeat, we undertake at our own 
risk.

Tragedy and Social Conflict

There is one final way I will consider in which we can analyze The Human 
Stain as a tragedy. Tragedies, again under a Hegelian description, describe 



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what happens when central beliefs within a society collide. To return to  
Antigone and Creon: both family and state were, in Creon’s Thebes, foun-
dational ethical powers. It was then inevitable that, when they collided,  
individuals would be destroyed. In Hegel’s parlance, such crisis can cause the 
inadequacy of one articulation of ethical life to give way to a new, more com-
plete articulation: in the case of the ancient Greeks, the unreflective beauty 
of Greek communal ethical life is ultimately interrupted by individual reflec-
tion. This reflectivity eventually replaces the original, unreflective ethical life 
as a source of ethical legitimacy.

It is this strain within the Hegelian tradition that inspired much of Ray-
mond Williams’ Modern Tragedy. According to Williams:

Important tragedies seem to occur, neither in periods of real stability, nor 
in periods of open and decisive conflict. Its most common historical setting 
is the period preceding the substantial breakdown and transformation of an 
important culture. Its condition is the real tension between old and new:  
between received beliefs, embodied in institutions and responses, and newly 
and vividly experienced contradictions and possibilities. (Williams 1966, 54)

In focusing on historical, cultural paradigm shifts as the most fecund 
ground for tragedy, Williams’ book is a sustained response to George Steiner’s 
1961 claim that tragedy in the modern world is no longer possible: that the 
reconciling, redemptive narratives of (for instance) Christianity and Marx-
ism have eliminated the raw, irresolvable conflict that is central to tragedy 
(see Steiner 1996). Williams diagnoses this willingness to abandon tragedy as 
dangerously self-deceptive, as an invitation to deny the social struggle in our 
midst. To say that tragedy is no longer possible is to say that tragedy is “about 
something else,” not about us and the “deep social crisis, war, and revolution, 
through which we have all been living” (Williams 1966, 62).

In hewing so close to tragic themes, Roth accepts, I think, Williams’ chal-
lenge to see tragedy not as “about something else” but very much about us. 
Tragedy on this reading exposes fault lines in a society’s self-conception that 
will ultimately convulse it. Roth chooses for his backdrop a moment we could 
describe in Williams’ terms: a moment in American history when racial stere-
otypes are still deeply “embodied in institutions and responses,” but these 
embodied prejudices are contrasted with “newly and vividly experienced 
contradictions and possibilities.” Surely one description of the violence and 
assassinations of the 1960s is that they reflected the “substantial breakdown 
and transformation of an important culture.”20 And surely one point of a 
novel like Roth’s is to prevent us from believing that tragedy is impossible in 
contemporary American society.



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But we can put a finer point on it. The Human Stain shows us, I think, 
two incompatible facts about American society: first, that America asks us to 
believe that we are free to be whoever we want to be; second, that America, 
like most societies, is riddled with injustice that can systematically warp any 
attempts to realize that dream. This injustice also threatens to warp individu-
als’ moral character, facilitating character traits like Coleman’s egomaniacal 
clinging to the “raw I” or other destructive characteristics such as apathy,  
defeatism, vengefulness or bitterness. To formulate this point in terms used by 
Terry Eagleton: tragedy marks “the limits of an existent regime of knowledge.” 
It “shows up what is necessary for a certain social or legal order to exist, and 
thus, in sketching its outer horizon of meaning, the points where it trembles 
into silence.”21 The social fact that The Human Stain “shows up” is the way 
black Americans were made the silent exception to the claim that “all men are 
created equal.” It was indeed a silence that “marked the limits of an existent  
regime of knowledge”: the denial of African-Americans’ basic rights exposed 
the  failure to keep faith with the “self-evident” truth at the heart of the Ameri-
can political system. And the silence was indeed “necessary for a certain social 
or legal order”—namely, segregation and institutionalized racism—“to exist.”
If tragedy in fact articulates the basic tensions and silences that underlie a 
social order, one reaction is to work to alleviate that tension. An obvious step 
to ease the tension at the heart of The Human Stain is to work to eradicate  
society’s injustices. We must do this, to put it again in Williams’ terms,  
“because there can be no acceptable human order while the full humanity of 
any class of men is in practice denied.”22 But to connect tragedy’s articulation 
of society’s tensions to tragedy as isolating faulty conceptions of freedom: a 
second step in easing this tension is to be clear about the kind of freedom 
our society is actually capable of sustaining without doing violence to fun-
damental principles of ethical life. This step would involve de-romanticizing 
and amending the idea of the unencumbered self and its less philosophical 
counterpart, the American dream. It would require acknowledging the fallacy 
of the “raw I” and recognizing the harm such a fallacy can cause. Both steps 
are daunting; the second may be as difficult as the first. The Human Stain, it 
seems to me, offers an indictment of America’s reluctance to take either step.

Conclusion
Coleman dies when his lover’s ex-husband, mad with (again, misfiring) anti-
Semitic jealousy and P.T.S.d., runs the car in which Coleman and his lover 
are driving off the road. (The killer’s confession is at [Roth 2000, 257].) The 
car careens over an embankment and into a river; both occupants are killed 



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instantly. Since there are no witnesses, the crash is ruled an accident. But vi-
cious and sordid rumors are spread about the accident’s cause. The worst of 
these, posted anonymously on Athena’s faculty discussion board, claims that 
the crash was a murder-suicide, Coleman’s final act of brutality against a wom-
an he had regularly abused (Roth 2000, 291–293).23 At his funeral, Coleman’s 
children engage in aggressive damage control, determined to salvage scraps of 
their father’s reputation. Coleman dies with his secret still a secret; only his 
sister Ernestine, anonymously attending the funeral, knows it and then shares 
it with Zuckerman.

Within Ernestine’s confiding in Zuckerman, we finally find evidence of 
something otherwise missing from the novel: we find a brief moment of rec-
ognition on Coleman’s part of the harm he has done.24 Coleman had in fact 
remained in touch with his sister throughout his life, calling to inform her of 
his marriage, the births of his children, his wife’s death. Ernestine reports that, 
speaking again of his estranged son Mark, Coleman had once said to her: “I got 
there what I produced…even if for the wrong reason. Markie doesn’t even have 
the luxury of hating his father for the real thing. I robbed him…of that part of 
his birthright, too….[H]e would have hated me for never telling him and be-
cause he had a right to know.” Coleman’s acknowledgement that he has robbed 
his children of their “right to know” is given to us at a distance, as it were: only 
through someone else’s account and only after his death. It is also the most 
cursory of admissions: it leaves unmentioned other harms Coleman’s deception 
caused, leaving us to speculate on how deep or wide his acknowledgement ac-
tually was. Ernestine herself says that, after this brief discussion, “because there 
was so much there to be misunderstood, we just let the subject drop” (Roth 
2000, 231–232). Nevertheless, Coleman’s acknowledgement of his children’s 
rights goes some way to alleviating our fear that Coleman’s grasping of the “raw 
I” had made him entirely oblivious to the harm he has caused others.

But Coleman’s acknowledgement remains, like so much in the novel, a 
secret from the greater community. This fact means that The Human Stain  
denies us two other moments that often typify tragedy. First, Coleman’s abrupt 
death means that he is given no opportunity to repent, to articulate humil-
ity, to recognize publicly how he has wronged his family and ask forgiveness. 
There is no culminating scene in which, like oedipus or Creon, Coleman 
appears—bloody, bruised, but enlightened—acknowledging publicly the er-
ror of his ways. The silent nature of Coleman’s rebellion also prevents us from 
gleaning the comfort that sometimes comes at tragedy’s end: the comfort that, 
despite our horror at the hero’s destruction, at least progress has been made 
in articulating the tensions of a society and their possible solution. This is the 



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comfort we feel when witnessing oedipus’s humility, Creon’s repentance, or 
Fortinbras’s dignified honoring of Hamlet. There is no such comfort at the 
end of The Human Stain. Coleman’s tragedy is a silent one: no one except his 
surviving siblings and Zuckerman know the truth about Coleman’s life. Since 
the community is not allowed to witness the truth of his life, Coleman’s death 
proves nothing, clarifies nothing, uncovers nothing. There is no communal 
catharsis within the novel.25 Any communal catharsis will have to be experi-
enced solely by the novel’s audience.26

The lack of such a moment at the end of The Human Stain is particularly 
cruel since American society is so clearly implicated in the injustice at the heart 
of Coleman’s life. our desire for acknowledgement on Coleman’s part of his 
wrongdoing is likely to be—and should be—ambivalent. What do we want 
him to acknowledge? That he should have succumbed to the “big they” and 
“little we” and lived a life of disadvantage, all because of human bigotry? That 
we are indeed obligated by inherited roles, however unjust? Surely not. Surely 
what would bring more relief and a sense of justice at the novel’s end would be 
his society’s acknowledgement of the impossible choices that a human evil like 
racism generates. It would be an acknowledgement that American society had 
a part in Coleman’s cultivation of a character trait that leads to his untimely 
death; that American society  is partly to blame for his estrangement from his 
children and the death of his wife; that Coleman, in short, is not a “raw I,” 
but a person deeply, tragically implicated in a web of social injustice. Perhaps,  
believing as he did in the “raw I,” Coleman would have resisted such a  
moment. Perhaps he would have preferred to die maligned and vilified than 
surrender to the “big they”’s communal narrative, no matter how redemptive. 
Perhaps it is for this reason that Roth assigns him a death that cuts him off so 
brutally, so ignobly, from his community—a death, in effect, so raw.

Notes

1. I would like to thank the anonymous referees of Expositions for their suggestions 
on an earlier draft of this paper; I would especially like to thank Bernard Prusak 
for his detailed help in thinking through the intricacies of the novel’s plot and its 
philosophical implications.

2. There is a wealth of substantial scholarship on tragedy in Hegel: Christoph 
Menke, in Tragödie im Sittlichen: Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit nach Hegel (Menke 
1996), gives a comprehensive account of Hegel’s complex theory of tragedy 
and its relevance for moral political theory, highlighting especially the tension  
between autonomy and authenticity typical of modernity. Allen Speight argues 
for the centrality of tragedy to Hegel’s conception of agency in his Hegel, Lit-



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erature, and the Problem of Agency (Speight 2001). other scholarship of note in-
cludes Michelle Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory: The Problem of Conflict since Aris-
totle (Gellrich 1988); Stephen Houlgate, “Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy,” in Hegel 
and the Arts (Houlgate 2007); and Mark William Roche, Tragedy and Comedy: A 
Systematic Study and a Critique of Hegel (Roche 1998).

3. Roth’s narrator reports that, as its first Jewish dean,“[Coleman] made the place 
competitive, which, as an early enemy noted, ‘is what Jews do’” (Roth 2000, 9).

4. It is, in another sense, possible that his students are black anti-Semites and that 
Coleman, despite not being a Jew, suffers here from anti-Semitism. As noted ear-
lier, there certainly was anti-Semitism among the College faculty, and Coleman 
likely suffered from it despite the fact that his colleagues were wrong in thinking he 
was Jewish. But I want here to highlight the sense that the alleged anti-Semitism 
misfires epistemologically: in order for a racial attack to be executed successfully, 
the person attacked should not only be believed to be a member of the targeted 
group, but actually be a member of that group. Let us assume for a moment that 
these students are targeting Coleman because they think he is Jewish and that, in 
addition, they dislike Jews. In this case, their motivations would be anti-Semitic, 
and they would, from a character or intention point of view, be anti-Semites. But 
on another level, epistemological accuracy is necessary for a specific act of anti-
Semitism to be successful. To parse the point according to the conventional epis-
temological criteria of justified true belief, Coleman’s students are justified in their 
belief that he is Jewish, but their belief is not true. on this level, the act misfires. 
There is, incidentally, no evidence that the students are anti-Semites. There is not 
even evidence that they thought Coleman was Jewish, much less that this belief 
motivated or intensified their accusations against him.

5. The plot is in fact yet more complicated: she is only “passing” as illiterate, for 
reasons of her own, and is actually keeping a detailed journal of the events.

6. Roth employs tragic vocabulary in other instances as well. In his last conversation 
with his mother, Coleman reflects that “he was murdering her. you don’t have to 
murder your father. The world will do that for you” (Roth 2000, 138). He also  
refers to a group of young faculty members commenting on the Monica Lewin-
sky affair as “the chorus” (Roth 2000, 151). A malicious and anonymous posting 
about Coleman’s death is sent from the account “clytemnestra@houseofatreus.
com”; the book’s final chapter is entitled “The Purifying Ritual.”

7. Hegel suggests, for instance, that “what principally counts in Greek drama, 
whether tragedy or comedy, is the universal and essential element in the aim 
which the characters are realizing” (Hegel 1975, 1206). In another passage, he 
claims that “modern tragedy adopts into its own sphere from the start the prin-
ciple of subjectivity. Therefore it takes for its proper subject matter and contents 
the subjective inner life of the character who is not, as in classical tragedy, a purely 
individual embodiment of ethical powers” (Hegel 1975, 1223). For a challenge 



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both to this claim about ancient Greeks’ sense of agency and to Hegel’s reading of 
this claim into Antigone, see (Gellrich 1988, 57–78).

8. Roth’s narrator Zuckerman suggests as much: “Was [Coleman] merely being  
another American and, in the great frontier tradition, accepting the democratic 
invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of 
happiness? or was it more than that? or was it less?” (Roth 2000, 334).

9. I think of Edna in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Bigger in Richard Wright’s 
Native Son as two other examples of individuals who assert a raw individuality 
against social norms and are destroyed in the process. Both Edna and Bigger 
violate fundamental ethical norms in the pursuit of individuality—Edna by com-
mitting adultery, Bigger by murdering Mary—and pay for this violation with 
their lives. Passing, a 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, also ends with the violent death 
of one of the main characters, a woman who is passing.

10. Hegel for instance says that dramas depicting tragedy are only possible in cultures 
that explicitly recognize human freedom: “truly tragic action necessarily presup-
poses either a live conception of individual freedom and independence or at least an 
individual’s determination and a willingness to accept freely and on his own account 
the responsibility for his own act and its consequences” (Hegel 1975, 1205).

11. See Korsgaard (1996, 102). John Rawls’ theory of the original position, which 
places individuals who do not know their particular commitments in the defining 
moment of justice, is sometimes criticized along these same lines, fairly or not. 
For a classic articulation of this kind of criticism, see Michael J. Sandel, “The 
Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” in Sandel (2005, chap. 23).

12. Coleman’s intemperance could, I suppose, be understood in terms of another 
standard feature of tragedy, namely, as a character flaw. I use this phrase while 
conscious that translating hamartia as “flaw,” rather than as “error,” has caused a 
good deal of misinterpretation of Aristotle’s point. But, as Amélie Rorty points 
out, error is not quite right either. She writes: “Though a protagonist’s hamartia 
might sometimes just involve his making a factual error, it is the sort of error that 
a person of his character would be typically prone to make. In combination with 
his character, it misleads his action” (Rorty 1992, 10).This, I think, is a descrip-
tion that could be applied to Coleman’s intemperate reactions to his children and 
friends. See also (Sherman 1992). For the source of Aristotle’s use of hamartia, see 
Aristotle, Poetics, 53a10.

13. Allen Speight discusses the role of regret in moral luck: see Speight (2001, 56). 
Coleman’s lack of regret means that Speight’s analysis here, however, cannot  
apply: Coleman neither wishes he had acted differently nor suggests he could not 
have acted differently.

14. Both Menke and Speight discuss the importance of irony in Hegel’s conception 
of tragedy and agency more generally. Their focus, however, is primarily on the 
ironic subject, the subject who says the opposite of what he means or, as Menke 



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puts it, “buries his meaning by saying its opposite.” See Menke (1996, 97) and 
Speight (2001, 110–111). Hegel famously describes this kind of irony as evil in 
Philosophy of Right, §140.

15. Because of its almost mechanistic connecting of a plot’s components, this level of 
irony skates dangerously close to the comic. In fact, while giving an earlier ver-
sion of this paper at a conference, I had the uncanny experience of hearing people 
laugh as I recounted the plot summary of The Human Stain. But Roth’s plot 
is anything but comic except in the most cringe-inducing, heartless way. What 
prevents the many ironies from becoming comic in the novel is the sympathy 
engendered for the protagonists by the details of the plot. Stripped essentially of 
these details, the ironies indeed risk being comic. Eagleton quotes the Irish poet 
Patrick Kavanagh as claiming that tragedy just is “underdeveloped comedy”; see 
Eagleton (2003, 188).

16. Roth’s lampooning of Coleman’s academic colleagues makes their self-righteous-
ness in the face of Coleman’s alleged misdeed almost unbearable. When Zucker-
man describes the incident to Coleman’s sister after his death, she responds, “I 
don’t believe I’ve ever heard of anything more foolish being perpetrated by an 
institution of higher learning. It sounds to me more like a hotbed of ignorance” 
(Roth 2000, 328).

17. We could perhaps describe the very development of these character traits as  
another instance of bad moral luck. Coleman indeed has objectionable char-
acter traits, but they are all too familiar: he is judgmental, condescending, and  
impatient; he terrorizes junior faculty and is by all accounts a domineering father. 
(Coleman’s own description of his parenting style is a sad and very human exam-
ple of good intentions gone unappreciated: see Roth [2000, 174].) But we know 
such people, and usually their character traits, although problematic, do not end 
in bloodshed. The fact that they do in Coleman’s case has again to do with the 
thoroughness with which he must cultivate his “raw I” in order to evade racial 
injustice successfully. By saying this I do not (as should become clear) excuse 
him. Coleman is not forced by his circumstances to continue to develop these 
character traits. It is at least conceivable that he could have perpetrated this major 
deception and gone on within his lie-based life to cultivate gentle, compassion-
ate character traits. But the fact that he does not is, I think, not unrelated to his 
particular situation either.

18. Another way of putting this is that, from the moral standpoint of the novel, 
Coleman dies fighting for the wrong thing. our sympathy for his deception 
is based on the fact that Coleman originally asserts “the raw I” against a deep  
injustice. Had he died as a direct consequence of this assertion of the “raw I”—
had someone discovered his secret and killed him for it, for instance—the plot 
would follow a more standard tragic trajectory. Instead, Coleman dies having  
asserted the “raw I” against the community in ways that are made to seem petty 



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and even pathetic. Roth depicts Coleman’s clinging to his love affair, especially 
after a particular argument with his son, as a direct rebellion against society in 
general and his children in particular: see Roth (2000, 174). Coleman is asserting 
the “raw I” once again, but in a cause much less noble. His death at the hands of 
his lover’s ex-husband instead appears caused by an aging man’s adolescent defi-
ance of both his body and of social norms.

19. The difficulty of assigning responsibility to tragic action is another common 
theme in the literature on tragedy. Terry Eagleton, for instance, writes that 
“[t]here is no unswerving trajectory between intention and effect….[T]he question ‘am 
I responsible for my actions?’ thus cannot be answered in the terms in which it is com-
monly proposed, since it betrays too thin a conception of what it is to act…. our free 
actions are inherently alienable, lodging obstructively in the lives of others and ourselves, 
merging with the stray shards and fragments of others’ estranged actions to redound on 
our own heads in alien form. Indeed, they would not be free actions at all without this 
perpetual possibility of going astray.” (Eagleton 2003, 110)

20. Another of the book’s ironies is that the silent nature of Coleman’s betrayal allows 
him to live through the 1960s without participating in the movement for social 
change himself. By the late 1960s, he in fact cannot participate in it as a black 
man without admitting to a lifetime of deception and very likely ending both his 
marriage and career. For this reason, Coleman’s fate does not bear witness to the 
social paradigm shift that tragedies, again according to Williams, showcase. In 
fact, that paradigm shift passes him by, locked as he is into his assumed role as a 
white man.

21. Eagleton is summarizing Timothy Reiss’s position in Tragedy and Truth. Reiss’s 
analysis rests on a Foucauldian analysis of the “absence of significance” to which 
I will not try to do justice to here. See Reiss (1980, 3 ff.) and Eagleton (2003, 
19).

22. For this reason, in Williams’ view, revolution remains necessary: I leave Williams’ 
nuanced discussion of tragedy’s tie to revolution undiscussed here. See Williams 
(1966, 77).

23. In the interest of space, I leave undiscussed the subplot involving delphine Roux, 
a subplot whose consequences significantly increase the scandal surrounding 
Coleman’s death.

24. Recognition is of course one of the characteristics of tragic plots articulated by 
Aristotle: see Aristotle, Poetics, 52a30. Aristotle primarily talks about recognition 
in oedipus’ sense, that is, of recognizing a previously unknown fact about one-
self; recognition in tragedy can also encompass, however, an agent’s recognition 
of guilt or responsibility.

25. Roth does leave open the possibility that Coleman’s story will indeed reach the 
community in the form of a novel by Zuckerman.

26. Again I think of Richard Wright’s depiction of Bigger Thomas, who acciden-



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tally murders a white woman but later comes to take responsibility for his crime 
and even embrace it. Wright is careful to give Bigger character traits throughout 
that bar the reader from sympathizing with him entirely. But Bigger is allowed a  
moment of recognition and regret before his electrocution, and the path is then 
open for the audience to sympathize with him at the end.

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