Essay2+Essay

Greg Raupp Hour 1 Home of the Who? The land of the free and the home of the brave, that is America. The world’s only pure-volunteer military defends the shores and freedoms of this great land. However, there are those who find discontent with America. Those who want to dismantle the American principles and strip the land of the free and the home of the brave. But how could one take away these two very important adjectives and leave America as just a land and a home? This is the question posed by Philip Roth in his novel //The Plot Against America.// Roth takes his readers back to a critical time in American history, World War II. However, instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt being elected president in the 1939 election, Roth sets up the challenger, Charles A. Lindbergh, for a victory, and the snowball plot starts a-rolling. Throughout the book, Roth examines how this alternative course of events would change everything about the path of the war. He starts with the much larger conflicts of World War II and Nazi Germany, and shows how a slight change of personnel at the Oval Office affects every single person in America, including a young Jewish boy in New Jersey. Roth starts his macrocosm at the highest peak of society in America and vividly shows how it works its way down to every last American. The change Roth creates tears apart families and rips loved ones from each other’s grasps. “’Then she is dead!’ Seldon screamed” after suspecting his mother was killed by an angry mob. Sadly, his suspicions were correct. How could one strip America and its people of their liberties? Simply tip the scales a bit in the wrong direction. Turn the United States into many factions against each other and fill the people with prejudice. By breaking the largest government in the land, Roth portrays how it shakes the foundations of the most basic government, the family. This can be seen when Philip’s dad gets into a fight with his nephew, Being that the title of the book is //The Plot Against America//, one should not consider it outlandish that Roth’s novel examines a plot to destroy the America that the people thereof know and love today. As Roth sifts through the story, leading a younger version of himself through a fire which no American youth would want to pass, it is the answering of his question that makes the reader understand his work. Like the answer, the question also reveals itself over the course of the novel. Granted, the question reveals itself far earlier in the book while the answer takes nearly the entire novel to unravel itself, it is the answering of Roth’s own question that creates the story. p. 65 “I’d give anything to slap him in the face.”