In his short story “Defender of the Faith” Philip Roth paints the very interesting and layered character of Sheldon Grossbart through the character’s words and actions. Through his depiction of a training camp for American soldiers during the Pacific War Roth reveals Grossbart to embody a variety of personality traits including; childlike innocence with roots in actual religious beliefs and manipulative tendencies . These traits tend to pale in comparison to Sheldon’s selfishness however. These are the traits which I have attempted to portray in my rendering of Sheldon Grossbart. Sheldon’s tendency to act childish can be irritating at times, but it can be easily explained. Sheldon Grossbart acts like a child because Sheldon Grossbart is a child. On page 764 when asked …show more content…
It could be argued that Grossbart is not selfish because he looks out for his friends, especially Lary Fishbein, who is youngest and most frail. However, in the final scene Sheldon throws his friends under to the curb in order to try and save himself from going to the Pacific War. On page 778, when confronted about abandoning his friends Sheldon casts all doubts aside about his true nature, revealing how selfish and scared he truly is by saying “ I owe nobody nothing. I've done all I could for them. Now I think I've got the right to watch out for myself." Later on the same page Marx realizes that even though Sheldon is ultimately self serving, he will work to help his friends if he “continued to see-in the obsequiousness of the one, the soft spirituality of the other-some profit for himself” (Roth, 778). I believe that his selfishness is largely rooted in his childlike nature, and that it is closely intertwined with his manipulative nature, and so in his portrait I have over lapped the colors representing both of those traits in order to represent his selfish