SOURCE: Rand, Naomi R. “Storyteller; The Bluest Eye; and Goodbye, Columbus: Promontories of Power.” In Silko, Morrison, and Roth: Studies in Survival, pp. 27-64. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Rand finds parallels between the protagonists in Storyteller, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, and Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus.

Christopher Lasch believed that American society in the 1970's was devolving, becoming a place where we were “fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future” (5). Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth are writers who have strong concerns with their own ethnic identity and the historical baggage attached to it. Yet each of these writers has chosen to present a version of self that is consistent with Lasch's diagnosis of the disassociated, narcissistic American. In Storyteller, The Bluest Eye, and...