Portnoy's Complaint

Alex’s mother is one of the most complex figures in Portnoy’s Complaint, in no small part because she is only portrayed from Alex’s unreliable perspective. In this sense, she functions as the cause and mediating force in many of his compulsions. Many of Alex’s earliest memories are of time spent with his mother, and he remembers in exact detail how she fussed over him when he was barely old enough to speak. Later in life, her attention becomes a curse, and he spends most of his time trying to hide from her so he can masturbate in peace. Alex loves and loathes his mother, and he struggles to distinguish between these competing emotions. The nonlinear structure of his narration means that he often places competing stories of affection and affliction alongside one another. In one memory, he presents an adoring version of his mother. In the next, she is a menace who hounds every waking moment of his life and chastises him for not fulfilling his potential.

Alex’s presentation of his mother indicates that she functions as a part of his subconscious. In a figurative sense, she is his own psyche made manifest. Her love and affection are Alex’s positive feelings about himself, and her criticisms and her punishments are the self-loathing from which he cannot escape. Alex can never sustain positive memories of his mother because they involve her showing him affection, and he cannot think positively about himself for very long. The competing presentation of Alex’s mother as a force for both good and evil represents Alex’s struggle with his own identity. He internalized her criticisms of him: He does not apply himself in school, other boys from the neighborhood are more successful, and he is constantly dating gentile women. When Alex remembers his mother criticizing him, the memories function as a form of self-criticism. He feels that he let down his mother, his family, his community, and himself. These negative emotions are presented as consequences of his mother’s influence when Alex lacks the capacity to critically examine himself.

Alex’s mother also factors into Alex’s discussions of the Oedipus Complex. Freud stated that young children develop sexual desires for their opposite-gender parent and resolve these feelings by forming an empathetic relationship with their same-gender parent. Alex knows just enough about Freud to discuss his feelings of attraction toward his mother but not enough to move toward any resolution—he lacks an empathetic relationship with his father. With this, Alex’s narration about his mother becomes a vehicle to explore his own psyche. He is insecure and desperate to prove his intelligence to the therapist, so he confidently reveals his shallow understanding of the therapist’s profession. By discussing his mother in these terms, Alex says more about himself than his actual mother. She is a symbol in his mind, someone he might blame for his anxieties. Rather than endearing the therapist to him, the therapist remains silent and allows Alex to continue to talk. Alex tries and fails to use his presentation of his mother as a vehicle for empathy, discrediting her in an attempt to put himself in a better light.

Alex’s father is the first character Alex introduces. Like Alex’s mother, he typically refers to his father by parental role rather than by name. Alex’s father and mother, in this sense, function as archetypes rather than individuals. He strips them of their names and encourages the audience to view these characters as he sees them: as father and mother. Alex compares and contrasts himself with his father from the very first moment that he is introduced. Alex tells the audience that his father is a perpetually constipated man. This constipation is one of the defining factors in his father’s life, leading to him spend many hours in the bathroom searching for relief.

This constipation plays an important thematic role. It is a metaphor for Alex’s father’s emotional withdrawal. He bottles up his emotions in the same way that his body physically bottles up his waste. Alex’s compulsion, by contrast, is in releasing rather than bottling up. He is in a therapy session and talks at length about his emotions, illustrating that he is the very opposite of constipated when it comes to sharing his feelings with others. Constipation provides a physical battleground on which father and son symbolically compete. Alex’s father wishes to use the bathroom to relieve his constipation while Alex covets the privacy of the bathroom as a place to masturbate. They argue over who gets to use the physical space, an argument which is only settled by Alex’s mother; they are competing for her attention and her affection in an oedipal fashion.

Alex’s father is also important to Alex’s understanding of what it means to be a Jewish man. Alex rejects religion, claiming that he is an atheist in an admitted attempt to infuriate his father. Though he rejects his father’s religion, he cannot reject his father’s ethnicity or genetics. Alex obsesses over the size of his nose and blames his father for passing it down to him. Though he dislikes his nose, Alex comes to understand it as a direct, physical link to his Jewish identity. Likewise, his father takes him to neighborhood softball games and bathhouses, providing Alex with an understanding of culture and community that has nothing to do with faith. The activities and physical attributes that Alex and his father share become a vehicle through which Alex explores his Jewish identity. Even if he occasionally tries to reject this identity, he can no more reject it than he can emancipate himself from his parents.

The Monkey is the nickname Alex gives to the principal romantic interest in his life. While he mentions her name occasionally, he overwhelmingly refers to her by this nickname. Through this, Alex reveals how he objectifies women. The Monkey is not the only woman with a nickname; most of the women Alex dates are referred to in this manner, allowing him to reduce their personalities down to easily identifiable traits rather than actual people with personalities. The nickname The Monkey comes from an embarrassing story told to Alex, in which she was asked to watch a couple have sex while eating a banana. Coupled with his low opinion of her intelligence, the nickname dehumanizes her and allows the audience to see her as Alex sees her: a sexual object.

The sexualization of The Monkey’s past is an important part of what attracts Alex to her. When they first meet, she is freshly divorced from a French industrialist whose unique sexual interests make Alex feel much better about his own depravity. He is eager to spend time with a woman who has already experienced much stranger situations than those to which he has subjected his past girlfriends. In The Monkey, he has a woman who he believes can withstand his more perverse and outlandish sexual requests. This gives Alex a feeling of control and, for the first time, allows him to ameliorate his feelings of shame and guilt regarding sex. Unfortunately for Alex, his tendency to dehumanize The Monkey means that he does not empathize with her. He does not understand that she does not view sex as he does. The shared understanding that he thought existed between them was entirely unilateral. This misunderstanding comes to a head in Europe. After an encounter with a sex worker, The Monkey is horrified that Alex reduced her to his depraved level. She threatens to throw herself from a hotel balcony unless he apologizes to her. Rather than apologize, Alex simply leaves. He washes his hands of responsibility and then never sees her again Through his failure to engage with The Monkey as a real person with emotions, Alex reveals how he dehumanizes and ignores all women in his life. Alex tells his therapist that The Monkey was an absurd woman, but his actions are far more revealing and damning of his own misogynistic, self-centered character. Ever the narcissist, Alex the narrator cannot talk about any other character without accidentally talking more about himself.