Existential Revision in Philip Roth's The Breast

Abstract:Why might Philip Roth, in 1980, have published a revised edition of The Breast (1972), and what do many of his emendations have to do with recent scholarly disclosure of the existential concerns of the original narrative? How, moreover, in the second edition, does de facto co-authored narrative technique pertain to Sartre's tenet that consciousness arises as an upsurge of nothingness amid the dross substance of non-reflective Being? I conclude that in the revised edition Roth imbues David Kepesh, his once-autonomous narrator, with levels of authorial cognizance that subordinate Kepesh's early outlooks to the consciousness-usurping intrusion of the author—now the author-narrator. That act of domination may dramatize Sartre's description of the existential "look," which stands to usurp the consciousness of "the Other." The act of thus revising an already existential narrative illustrates the flight of the Sartrian "For-Itself" toward "the higher functions of consciousness."