American Pastoral Language and Communication

Writing is Zuckerman's chief means of communication. These quotes you're reading suggest he's pretty good with words. His books are often obsessed with miscommunications, with fluidity, with speech, and with a wide variety of communication tools.

This is the Swede's explanation for Merry's stuttering. It's way different from the view of Merry's psychiatrist, who thinks she does it on purpose to get back at her parents for being so outwardly perfect. Merry's stuttering gets lots and lots of focus in the novel. Why?

So Merry has to write down the mistakes she makes when she's speaking. This is only one of the ways that botched communication is compounded in American Pastoral.

Merry is addressing Lyndon Johnson in 1968, when she's sixteen. She blames him for letting the Vietnam War go on. It's a study in communication because Merry is talking to him while he's on TV. She can hear him, but he can't hear her. She feels powerless.

This is the Swede's grim vision of life, after Merry detonates the bomb and disappears for five years. After this event, nothing in life makes any sense to him at all.

This is the sign that Vicky, the forewoman at Newark Maid, puts up in the windows during the 1967 "race riots." The windows with the signs are shot out by what the Swede thinks are racist white policemen.

The Swede really wants to tear this article about Merry down from the bulletin board that's near where Hamlin's store used to be. When the new store is built a year later, the articles finally come down.

Of all the hundreds of articles about Merry that the Swede read, this one bothers him the most. Why do you think this is?

This is Bill Orcutt talking, not long after the Swede sees him having sex with Dawn in the kitchen. Given this, how would you categorize Orcutt's speech in this moment?

Unless you are Dawn and the Swede, this moment is pretty funny. Roth's decision to put Lou's words in caps in his conversation with Dawn makes it seem all the more ludicrous.