Philip Roth Confirms: Indignation's Narrator Not Dead, At Least Not Until After the Book Ends

PR: Well that's what I think.

LL: Oh, that's what you think?

PR: Yeah.

LL: So that was a suggestion that other people are misreading when people think that he's dead?

PR: I'll let them read how they read. He says-in the narration that I quoted in the way that you say-that he's dead. And experiences the state he's in as death. And this must be what death is, he thinks, which is you remember in detail the past, and that's all you do. So it's a kind of hell. Not until the end do we discover that this is-I think you discover-this is a morphine-induced hallucination and in the morphine revelry that he has he tells his story, and in that morphine revelry he wonders where the hell am I? And he thinks, well I must be dead. And in fact he does die, but he dies after the morphine-induced thought of death comes to him.