human stain

One of the main problems described in The Human Stain is the dependence between the perception of another person and the context in which this takes place. People can quickly shift attitudes depending on who they are with and especially to how they are feeling which can cause a myriad of perceptions, even from just one view. Coleman Silk is a character that Philip Roth explores through the eyes of Nathan Zuckerman and he follows a map of dramatic revelations which causes even readers to have shifting opinions about Silk. Thus one person can contain many different features which are hidden not because the person wants to hide them, but due to an absence of the context needed for the revelation of them.

Philip Roth provides pieces of evidence concerning different situations where Coleman showed to his neighbor Nathan some new aspects of his personality. The first is about women: “Now that he was no longer grounded in his hate, we were going to talk about women. This was a new Coleman … the Coleman contaminated by desire alone” (20). This piece can be related to famous psychologist, Sigmund Freud's idea of two powers governing every human: “eros” and “thanatos”, desire and death, creative and destructive powers of the world. Certainly, these powers are interdependent, because nothing new will be created without destroying of something old. In the context of the book, the appearance of desire in lieu of hate in Coleman's character shows that he is able to lead a new, productive life, without self-destructive thoughts and memories about his colleagues who were involved in the incident with “Spooks”. Desire and destruction always were neighbors in Coleman, and the main importance of the scene when Nathan sees him renewed is that the...

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...is why everyone can return to their past state of mind, if there will be some terms created. For Coleman such a term was the letter.

The Human Stain speaks a great deal about human nature and an underlying theme was always that everyone has secrets. Not lies, just secrets. Nathan had some presuppositions concerning Coleman: about his grief, hate and other qualities he saw in Coleman earlier. But with some changes in the context of their communication, (Coleman's self-realization through a new lens) Nathan discovers for himself some new sides of his friend's character. One important detail is that Coleman does not hide these features of his character and life from Nathan. He was always ready to reveal them and even much more others, but he did not have some needed parts of the context in which certain sides of his personality are revealed and some others – hidden.