He has a disastrous encounter with a local girl named Bubbles in which he ejaculates in his eye and she calls him an antisemitic slur. As a teenager, his first experiences with sex were equally confusing. Despite feeling as though he was constantly being watched, Alex could not stop masturbating.

He remembers his mother’s strange punishments, including locking him outside the apartment and threatening him with a bread knife. He hid his constant, compulsive masturbation from his parents to the point that his mother suspected that he suffered from diarrhea. Growing up in New Jersey in the 1930s, Alex was required to tread carefully around his family home. He focuses on his nose as an illustration of his Jewishness and how it marks him out as different. Furthermore, Alex worries that his Jewish ethnicity makes him stand out in American society. While Alex would like to lead a normal, healthy life, he worries that his sexual urges prevent him from doing so. He feels this overbearing childhood resulted in him having no healthy outlet for his voracious teenage sexual appetite. Alex reflects on his childhood, explaining how his father spent many hours in the bathroom and his mother monitored his every movement. These memories are often vaguely connected by some sexual desire or misdeed.Īlex’s main focus is sex he is obsessed with sex but conflicted about his obsession at the same time. Within these chapters, he leaps in a non-linear fashion from one memory to the next. Alex’s descriptions to his therapist are divided into chapters. At the same time, he criticizes his soft-spoken, perpetually constipated father for failing to help him. Alex tells his therapist how he blames his overbearing and authoritarian mother for his sexual digressions, misgivings, and obsessions. In Portnoy’s Complaint, he describes his neuroses to his therapist, Dr. This guide was written using an eBook version of the 1994 First Vintage International Edition of Portnoy’s Complaint.Ĭontent Warning: Portnoy’s Complaint depicts antisemitism and an attempted rape.Īlexander Portnoy is a deeply neurotic, young, Jewish man. Roth passed away in 2018 at the age of 85.

Roth had a prolific writing career and won dozens of awards for his books, including the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize in 2001 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Portnoy’s Complaint was his fourth novel, and the controversy surrounding it caused his fame to skyrocket. Roth was an established author before Portnoy’s Complaint was published his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, won the 1960 National Book Award.

Portnoy's complaint first edition