The Breast by Philip Roth
"The Breast" is a novella that explores the surreal transformation of David Kepesh, a man who inexplicably becomes a six-foot, 155-pound human breast. The narrative begins with Kepesh’s heightened sexual sensations and culminates in a metamorphosis that challenges his identity and understanding of sexuality. As he navigates his new existence, Kepesh reflects on his previous stable life and his relationship with Claire, a woman he has been with for three years. The story is divided into five sections, detailing his experiences in the hospital, interactions with medical professionals, and his evolving feelings about his condition.
Throughout the novella, Kepesh grapples with themes of madness, desire, and the impact of literature on his perceptions. He contemplates the implications of his transformation, experiencing both physical and emotional disorientation. The narrative raises questions about identity and the nature of reality, leaving readers to ponder whether Kepesh is indeed hallucinating or has truly become the object of his past affection. The exploration is imbued with both humor and a deep sense of existential inquiry, making "The Breast" a thought-provoking examination of human experience through a unique and challenging lens.
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The Breast
First published: 1972
Type of work: Novella
Type of plot: Fantasy—magical realism
Time of work: 1971-1972
Locale: New York City
The Plot
The narrator, David Kepesh, recounts the changes that occurred in his life in the preceding two years, beginning with the peculiar sensations he felt in his penis. These sensations of increased sensitivity, accompanied by increased sexual desire, led to the change that took place between midnight and 4 a.m. on February 18, 1971. Kepesh became a six-foot, 155-pound human female breast. The novella chronicles Kepesh’s responses to his condition, which vary from acceptance to a conviction that he has become mad.
The novella is divided into five sections. In the first, Kepesh describes his “symptoms” before the change from man to mammary. He details his sexual feelings for Claire, the twenty-five-year-old woman he has been seeing for three years. The cooling of his desire for her during the past year changed right before his transformation: He felt excruciatingly sensitive while making love to her, but only because his penis was becoming a nipple and areola and the rest of his body was becoming a huge breast disconnected from any human form. Up to this point, Kepesh’s life had been stable for the first time in more than a decade, and his relationship with Claire provided warmth and security without “the accompanying burden of dependence, or the grinding boredom” of most marriages with which he was familiar. That comfort, however, vanished with his metamorphosis.
In the second section, Kepesh is tended to first by Dr. Gordon, his physician, and then Dr. Klinger, his psychiatrist of six years. Gordon informs Kepesh that he is in Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan and describes the little that is known about the hormonal imbalance that has created Kepesh’s condition. Klinger then talks with Kepesh, who can speak and hear through his nipple, about his feelings. Kepesh rants about his inability to go mad and his uncanny ability, which he thinks arises from his fear of death, to put “one foot in front of the other” in an earnest way, no matter what the circumstances. His will to live is as persistent as his sexual desires.
Kepesh begins to come to terms with his new sexuality in the third section, feeling as if he would like to have sex with Claire or the nurse who washes him in the hospital. He conjures up graphic and highly imaginative ways for a breast to have sex with a woman, but he decides finally to satisfy himself with the arousal provided by Claire’s kisses and by bathings he receives from the fifty-six-year-old nurse, Miss Clark. He imagines that if he were to give in to his desires, his “appetites could only become progressively strange, until at last [he] reached a peak of disorientation from which [he] would fall—or leap—into the void.” He decides to have his nipple sprayed with a mild anesthetizing solution before Miss Clark’s ablutions, and he refrains from asking Claire to perform more deeds than she suggests.
In the final two sections, Kepesh becomes convinced that he is mad and that his training as a professor of literature has brought on his condition. He wonders whether his reading of surreal and fantastic literature by Franz Kafka and Nikolai Gogol has in some way affected his mind. In the last pages, the reader is fifteen months into Kepesh’s condition and is still not given a definitive answer: Is Kepesh hallucinating, or has he simply become the female breast that he loved as an infant and as a man?
Bibliography
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Halio, Jay L., and Ben Siegel, eds. “Turning Up the Flame”: Philip Roth’s Later Novels. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004.
Lee, Hermione. Philip Roth. London: Methuen, 1982.
Milbauer, Asher Z., ed. Reading Philip Roth. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.
Pinsker, Sanford. The Comedy That “Hoits”: An Essay on the Fiction of Philip Roth. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975.
Pinsker, Sanford, ed. Critical Essays on Philip Roth. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
Rodgers, Bernard F., Jr. Philip Roth. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
Schechner, Mark. After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish American Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Schechner, Mark. “Up Society’s Ass, Copper”: Rereading Philip Roth. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Shostak, Debra. Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.