American Pastoral: Flashbacks 2 key examples

In the first chapter, the narrator's position and the narrative structure feel pretty straightforward. The narrator's first-person experiences occupy a relatively central part of this chapter.He writes in the first person, and, while his main focus is the Swede and the Levov family, details about his own life play an important role in the story he's telling. Although he includes a number of flashbacks in his narration, the temporal situation is also quite clear. Looking back on his early years, the narrator is speaking to the reader from somewhere between middle and old age.

Over the course of Part 1, however, the narrative structure becomes much more muddled. Chapter 2 opens with a speech Nathan Zuckerman writes after his high school reunion—in which he looks back on the same period he already dipped into in Chapter 1, this time from the more general perspective of his graduating class. After this, he rewinds slightly and begins to tell the story of the reunion that precipitated the speech. Chapter 3 begins when, at the reunion, he meets the Swede's brother Jerry Levov and discovers not only that the Swede has just died but also that Zuckerman had completely misunderstood him. This revelation sparks the project that turns into the rest of the novel: to tell the story of "the Swede's great fall."

Over the course of Chapter 3, Zuckerman's first-person point of view is gradually displaced. When the narrator says that he "found" the Swede in Deal, New Jersey "the summer his daughter was eleven," this is pretty much the last time Zuckerman expresses himself in the first person in the rest of the novel. From this point onward, the temporal situation toggles back and forth between the years before and after Merry's disappearance. Lacking a conventional chronological structure, the narrative in large part consists of a long and associative thread of flashbacks.

The high school reunion thus acts as a framing device, from which Zuckerman looks back on the life story the Swede never got the chance to tell him. It's worth noting that, almost right away, Zuckerman acknowledges that he's an unreliable narrator. In no way claiming that this is how the Swede's life really unfolded, he instead describes his project as "[dreaming] a realistic chronicle." Roth thus seems to be exploring and commenting on the act of storytelling and the notion of truth. Relatedly, it's hard to avoid being struck by the self-referentiality of Zuckerman's project, in which he forces himself to "inhabit this person least like myself, disappear into him, day and night try to take the measure of a person of apparent blankness and innocence and simplicity, chart his collapse, make of him, as time wore on, the most important figure in my life." As Roth makes up the character and life of Zuckerman, Zuckerman makes up the character and life of the Swede.

In Chapter 5, the narrator conjures up a flashback to the first time anyone called Seymour "Swede" and shows that this nickname is part and parcel with the character's love for "being an American."

The flashback opens with a gym class on the Swede's first day of high school: "jerking around with the basketball while the other kids were still all over the place getting into their sneakers," he manages to drop two hook shots from fifteen feet away. This achievement sparks his lifelong nickname:

And then that easygoing way that Henry “Doc” Ward, the popular young phys ed teacher and wrestling coach fresh from Montclair State, laughingly called from his office doorway—called out to this lanky blond fourteen-year-old with the  brilliant blue gaze and the easy, effortless style whom he’d never seen in his gym before—"Where’d you learn that, Swede?"

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Because the name differentiates him from his classmates Seymour Munzer and Seymour Wishnow, the nickname sticks throughout the Swede's freshman year—and beyond. For "as long as Weequahic remained the old Jewish Weequahic and people there still cared about the past," the gym teacher Doc Ward is "known as the guy who’d christened Swede Levov."

For the Swede, there is something quintessentially American about this memory and the way the nickname remained in his life.

Simple as that, an old American nickname, proclaimed by a gym teacher, bequeathed in a gym, a name that made him mythic in a way that Seymour would never have done, mythic not only during his school years but to his schoolmates, in memory, for the rest of their days. He carried it with him like an invisible passport, all the while wandering deeper and deeper into an American’s life, forthrightly evolving into a large, smooth, optimistic American such as his  conspicuously raw forebears—including the obstinate father whose American claim was not inconsiderable—couldn’t have dreamed of as one of their own.

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In this passage, the narrator captures the Swede's awe over the simple origin and legendary effect of his nickname. The simile, in which the nickname is likened to an invisible passport, shows how the name and its backstory make the character feel as though he's part of something bigger than himself—like he's part of America. 

It's worth noting that what initially sparks this flashback is the Swede's surprise and pain over the ease with which his family members are able to claim that they hate things they once loved. When he hears Dawn tell Bill Ortcutt that she hates their house, he feels as though she's saying that she hates the Swede and their life together. This unleashes a powerful passage in which he defends his unchanging and unapologetic love for their house, Merry, and America. Unlike Dawn, the difficulties of the present don't lead him to reject his past. This is encapsulated by his continued identification with a nickname he acquired in a high school gymnasium. Tied to his nostalgic attachment to the past, the Swede's name informs his patriotic view of America.