Indigenous Arrows and “Becom[ing] Again . . . What We Never Were” in Philip Roth’s <i>Nemeses</i> Tetralogy

Abstract Nemeses (2006–2010), Philip Roth’s last completed tetralogy of short novels, are connected by a series of magical arrow figures. These arrows draw on indigenous North American religious ideas concerning hunting as well as spirit-arrows that spread disease. While critics have considered the Nemeses’s representations of plague, post-traumatic memory, and Jewish ritual, little critical attention has been given to these Indian arrows. This article performs a Rothian “linking up” of the indigenous figures in the tetralogy, and examines how magic acts in these short novels combine indigenous elements with Jewish and Christian rituals. The Nemeses’s images of indigeneity serve to resacralize a Jewish-American familial and communal past that Roth’s oeuvre had previously sought to reject at significant moments in his mature fiction. Against a resacralized “home” and the dream of, in Michel Foucault’s phrase, “becoming again what we never were,” indigenous arrow figures overwhelmingly express protagonists’ trajectories away from that home toward a freedom and solitude that is finally presented as disaster.