Philip Roth

Roth writes with a rhythm that maintains the fluidity of his prose throughout this passage, and works an emphatic signifier upon his digression from the beat of his language.

'And how did this affect him-the glorification, the sanctification, of every hook shot he sank, every pass he leaped up and caught, every line drive he rifled for a double down the left-field line? Is this what made him that staid and stone-faced boy? Or was the mature-seeming sobriety the outward manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that an entire community was ladling with love?'

'every line drive he rifled for a double down the left-field line?'

'the glorification, the sanctification'

'of every hook shot he sank'

'made him that staid and stone-faced boy?'

Each of these lines evokes a rhythm; Roth employs the repetition of stress to construct patterns of sounds and images in his prose, each one feeds into the next and elicits a new rhyme or beat. While 'sanctification' and 'glorification' rhyme, the use of assonance and alliteration in 'hook shot he sank' maintains the beat of the passage, proceeding the rhyme.

As Roth digresses into a social statement, loosening his aggrandizement of the community's glorification of 'the swede,' to make an analytical observation, he changes the beat of his prose.

'Or was the mature-seeming sobriety the outward manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that an entire community was ladling with love?'

This sentence diminishes the poetic formalism of the previous lines and evokes a sense of analytical realism that contemplates the fears, insecurities, and anxieties of the era on which Roth writes.

His solid construction of rhythms emphasizes the absence of the poetic in a recollection that reads more soberly than nostalgic.