About one-quarter of the way into Indignation, the protagonist almost casually announces that he is dead, and has been for who knows how long. He is narrating an account of his brief life: son of a kosher butcher from Newark, N.J., sophomore at a private college in Ohio, whose headstrong missteps led to the cancellation of his deferment and his conscription, which in turn led to his death on a spiny hillside of Korea in 1952. The sharp knives of a childhood spent in a butcher shop are only one foretaste of his fate, if fate is the right word for a chain of events formed by a series of poor decisions. Although the boy narrator, created by one of America's great living novelists, has decided he was an atheist, his lonesome afterlife, trapped in an eternity of memory, could count as a definition of hell.
Indignation (Houghton Mifflin)
by Philip Roth
