Portnoy's Complaint

“How crazy can she possibly be?”

Alex’s memories of his mother vary wildly. Alex shares an early memory in which she seems to threaten him with a bread knife, suggesting that it played an important role in the development of his psyche. When he asks “how crazy can she possibly be” (11), however, he is also asking this about himself. He is searching for answers regarding his own state of mind, and he presents his parents’ erratic behavior as a yardstick against which he can judge himself.

“Disaster, you see, is never far from my mind.”

Alex is a natural pessimist. A recurring idea is that he chooses the most depressing or pessimistic interpretation of any given event. When he says that disaster is never far from his mind, the story’s structure proves his point. The non-linear structure allows Alex to present any happy memory alongside an unhappy memory, but he sandwiches brief moments of optimism with relentless pessimism.

“Is this the Jewish suffering I used to hear so much about?”

Alex’s ironic comment about “Jewish suffering” illustrates his complicated relationship with his own culture. He is keenly aware of the history of persecution and prejudice experienced by Jewish people, including himself and his family. This concept of Jewish suffering extends back millennia, but Alex makes a wry comparison with whatever his particular bugbear of the day might be. He presents individual suffering as symptomatic of broader, cultural suffering, inviting the historic problems of his people down on himself.

“Better she should have bled herself out on our cold bathroom floor, better that, than to have sent an eleven-year-old boy in hot pursuit of sanitary napkins!”

Alex’s elaborate reactions to his parents’ behavior are only voiced in the privacy of the therapy session. When he wishes violence on his mother, for example, his memory shows that he did exactly as she asked while harboring his quiet resentment for many years. Alex buries these slights and insults deep in his psyche and allows them to fester and metastasize rather than speak to his parents in search of a solution.

“We were Jews—and we were superior!”

When the family moves to a Jewish neighborhood, Alex is presented with a form of ethnic identity and pride that he previously lacked. Through sports, community events, and shared experiences, he begins to take pride in being Jewish. What had previously marked him out as separate now marks him as part of the community. Alex’s childhood in New Jersey equips him with a certain idea of Jewishness, for better or for worse.

“Why can’t I exist now as I existed for the Seabees out there in center field?”

Alex enjoys playing softball because it provides him with an explicit and legible set of rules. If he wants to succeed at softball, he need only follow a set of instructions that makes sense to him. He does not have this same benefit when he is trying to define his own identity. Life, to Alex, suffers because it lacks a set of clear and functional rules which govern everybody in the same way.

“Such a creature, needless to say, has never been boiled alive in our house—the lobster, I refer to.”

Alex’s memories are presented non-linearly. Despite the lack of chronological linearity, Alex often finds themes and associations between his memories. When he thinks about masturbating on a bus, for example, he also thinks about eating lobster. For Jewish people who keep kosher, lobster is a forbidden food. Eating lobster is a transgressive act, one in which Alex revels but which sickens his mother. Masturbating on a bus is a similarly transgressive act, one which gratifies Alex but then fills him with a sense of shame. He enjoys being transgressive, but he resents the consequences of these transgressive acts.

“Surely, Doctor, we can figure this thing out, two smart Jewish boys like ourselves.”

The entire novel is presented from Alex’s viewpoint. Alex is an erudite and engrossing figure, someone who is able to tell stories and jokes about himself that distract from the deep pain he often feels. Part of his storytelling approach is to invite empathy at moments when he feels particularly ashamed. He expresses his shame by trying to bond with the therapist, establishing their similarities and giving them a shared task of figuring “this thing out” (45). In doing so, Alex deliberately drags the doctor into his neuroses and makes him complicit in the search for a solution.

“The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel—on the boy of every Jewish child!—not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU’LL BE A PARENT AND YOU’LL KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE.”

Alex tries to convey the omnipresence of his parents in his life. He does so by using coins as a metaphor. He reimagines the nickel, wondering whether the distinctly American slogan written across the coin could be replaced by something he considers to be distinctly Jewish. Such a coin would be carried around by everyone, a constant reminder of the shared, cultural identity that is contained in parents’ comments to their children. 

“I mean here’s a joke for you, for instance. Three Jews are walking down the street, my mother, my father, and me.”

Alex uses the framework of a joke to convey his difficulties to the therapist. To him, a self-loathing individual, a joke is the only suitable way to understand such an absurd and obscene life. In this sense, the joke is more of a coping mechanism than a genuine attempt at humor. Alex is attempting to garner sympathy by presenting his life as absurd rather than obscene, trying to make people like him by entertaining rather than offending them.

“What misery descends upon me as the last drop dribbles into my mitt.”

Alex attends a burlesque show and masturbates into a catcher’s mitt. As soon as he is done, he is hit by a wave of shame and “misery” (65). The iconography of the scene is important: Alex uses a catcher’s mitt, an item he associates with the great, American pastime of baseball as well as the community softball games that he played in his youth. His urgent, desperate need for sexual gratification contends with his shame and guilt for having desecrated such an important symbol of history and community.

“Listen, this may well be the piece of information we’ve been waiting for, the key to what determined my character, what causes me to be living in this predicament, torn by desires that are repugnant to my conscience, and a conscience which is repugnant to my desires.”

Alex knows just enough about psychology to diagnose himself with various issues but not enough to provide solutions to these problems. He speaks to the therapist about his conscience and his desires, talking as though he is about to reach a breakthrough in his therapy. Like everything else in Alex’s dramatic monologue, however, this is a false dawn. He switches immediately to another memory and never reaches the breakthrough that he is so certain he is about to achieve.

“I lower my head to the kitchen table and on a piece of my father’s office stationery outline my profile with a pencil.”

Alex proves to himself that his nose is large by tracing it on a piece of paper, using his father’s stationery. The symbolism of the scene indicates the cause of his self-loathing: He views his large nose as a hereditary gift, something passed down to him from generations of Jewish people via his father. He hates this nose and blames his father for giving it to him. His use of his father’s stationery is important, as he is performatively attributing his hereditary features to his father. The act is a symbolic attribution of blame.

“My right mind is simply that inheritance of terror that I bring with me out of my ridiculous past.”

Alex makes a blunt and obvious statement about his psyche. In his attempt to self-diagnose, he finds an elaborate way to say that the problems of his present are caused by the past. Alex is not necessarily correct as the problem is more nuanced; Alex’s problem is that he cannot abandon his past. He is haunted by his memories and the shame they bring him. The attempted self-diagnosis is a continuation of this process, and Alex will not be able to resolve his anxieties until he can successfully leave his past in his past.

“Why, they’re supposed to be in jail—or the gutter.”

Alex is reintroduced to a childhood acquaintance and is horrified to discover that the person seems well-adjusted and normal. In his youth, boys like this provided Alex with a necessary counterbalance; he was disgusted with himself, but he felt assured that he was at least not as depraved as them. Now, they are successful, married, and seemingly happy. Alex feels outraged because, with this, he loses his assurance that he is not the worst person. The success of these depraved individuals is more proof for Alex that the world is unfair.

“Before I go out of my head, I have to know what it’s like.”

Alex’s monologue ventures near his real problems without ever fully engaging with the root cause of his anxieties. As such, there is an inherent irony in his words. When he speaks about going “out of his head” (89), he seems unaware that he is already behaving irrationally, driven by compulsions that he feels the need to satisfy. Alex is in therapy after a lifetime of anxiety; he seems desperate to avoid a descent into psychological chaos but that has already occurred.

“How unnatural can a relationship be! This woman is ineducable and beyond reclamation.”

Alex and his parents disapprove of the same woman for different reasons. His parents are concerned that she is not Jewish while Alex is more concerned that she is not intelligent. The difference between these concerns shows the different ways Alex defines himself. While his parents consider themselves to be Jewish first and foremost, Alex regards himself as an intellectual more so than Jewish. He tries not to base his identity on his ethnicity, though he can never truly avoid doing so. To Alex, intellectualism is a diversion from an issue that he does not want to confront: his relationship with Judaism.

“Oh, I’ll get to that, no worry, self-laceration is never more than a memory away, we all know that by now.”

Alex takes a perverse pleasure in listing his faults. In the controlled, safe confines of the therapy session, he is finally free to confess to all the shameful acts he perpetrated. In this sense, the therapy sessions are more confessions than medical procedures. Alex is given a platform to vent, expunging himself of the guilt and shame that have haunted him for so long. Self-laceration is the point of the sessions for Alex, and he takes pleasure in doing so.

“Only I’m still telephoning my parents to say I’m not coming home! Fighting off my family, still!”

This phone call from Alex to his parents is an important moment in his life. During the phone call, he disappoints them by revealing that he will be spending Thanksgiving with a gentile woman from the Midwest rather than his parents. Alex’s entire life is spent trying to escape his parents’ particular conception of Jewishness and integrate himself into non-Jewish, mainstream America. The phone call is emblematic of this desire and—as with everything else in Alex’s life—he feels guilty for abandoning his parents.

“No, Sally Maulsby was just something nice a son once did for his dad.”

Alex lacks the tools to communicate with his parents, so he tries to do so via actions. His brief, romantic relationship with Sally is a way for him to symbolically embrace his American, gentile identity in a manner he thinks might please his father. However, Alex never explains this to his father and could never dream of doing so. He will never have a discussion with his father about the complex intersection of ethnicity, religion, and identity in America. Instead, he sleeps with gentile women and pretends that this is a suitable substitute for such a conversation. Alex justifies his failed relationship with post hoc, vapid intellectualism.

“The ridiculing, the joking, the acting-up, the pretending—anything for a laugh! I love it!”

Alex is very negative about his experiences as a Jewish man in America. He is only prepared to discuss the community in a positive light toward the end of the novel, in Part 6. The ability to joke, ridicule, and pretend is a quality that he cannot find outside of Judaism and that he cannot leave behind. Alex loves this aspect of Jewish life, so much so that his therapy session attempts to capture this community spirit by turning his entire life into an extended joke. Alex’s joke-like framing of his failures is, in some sense, a tribute to Jewishness.

“I am in a Jewish country. In this country, everybody is Jewish.”

In Israel, Alex struggles to comprehend the social inversion that he experiences. He has spent his life as a minority in the United States, but in Israel, Jewish people are the majority. Alex is stunned that “everybody is Jewish” (122), but he does not feel like he is part of a cohesive community. He still feels like an outsider, suggesting that his feelings of alienation and marginalization are due to something deeper and more individual than race.

“You are not the enemy of the system. You are not even a challenge to the system, as you seem to think. You are only one of its policemen, a paid employee, an accomplice.”

Naomi accuses Alex of being a part of the very system that he claims to hate. Her words are so scathing because Alex immediately realizes that she is correct; he is a cog in a machine, a small and relatively inconsequential part of a society who nevertheless helps it function. Alex has assured himself that he is a rebel or an outsider but, as Naomi illustrates, this is far from the case. Rather, he is a comfortable, wealthy example of professional success, even if he is driven by anxieties.