The challenges of writing physical pain: Philip Roth’s voice in pain

Writing about physical pain entails persistent challenges: the diagnostic impasse between doctors and patients, the metaphorization of pain in literature, and the reader’s tendency to reduce pain to cliché. Focusing on Philip Roth’s ‘Novotny’s Pain’ (1962) and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), this article examines how Roth transforms pain from a private symptom into an ethical and cultural discourse. Drawing on the frameworks of the medical humanities, narrative ethics, and Bakhtin’s polyphony, it argues that Roth anticipates a post-biomedical understanding of pain aligned with the biopsychosocial model. He contests the authority of the clinical gaze, disperses meaning across medical, psychoanalytic, and aesthetic registers, and redefines empathy as an ‘ethics of listening’ grounded in interpretive participation rather than emotional identification. Through the fusion of autobiographical trace and fiction, Roth’s ‘polyphonic manifesto of pain’ exposes the collusion of medical and military power in ‘Novotny’s Pain’ and voices the post-assimilation dilemmas of Jewish identity in The Anatomy Lesson. By narrating what resists diagnosis, Roth bridges the ‘empathy gap’ between sufferer and reader, demonstrating how literature resists reductionism, cultivates cognitive empathy, and restores the ethical dimension of human vulnerability.