The Dying Animal (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Philip Roth
- First Published: 2001
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: The present
- Setting: New York City
- Principal Characters: David Kepesh, Consuela Castillo, Kenny Kepesh, George O’Hearn
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction
- Subjects: Teaching or teachers, New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Sex or sexuality, New York City, Cancer, Death or dying, Youth, Terminal illness or terminally ill, Old age or elderly people, Aging, 2000’s
- Locales: New York, NY
This short novel’s narrator and protagonist, David Kepesh, is one of the fictive advocates whom Roth tends to employ in his novels, though he is not as busily used as Nathan Zuckerman, who is featured in eight of the author’s twenty-four books. Kepesh was first met in The Breast (1972), where a medical catastrophe somehow changed him into a 155-pound female bosom. Then, in The Professor of Desire (1977), he starred in an erotic Bildungsroman, describing his sexual adventures from adolescence to thirty-four. Now he is seventy, white-haired, his neck wattled, but...
[The entire page is 1926 words long]
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