The Politics of Alienation in Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success

ABSTRACT

This article considers Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success as a literary exploration of alienation that is set against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election in the United States. It exposes alienation as involving and also transcending immigrant identity, the central subject of most of Shteyngart’s works. By putting Lake Success into conversation with Rahel Jaeggi’s theory of alienation and American authors who comment on the subject, I argue that Shteyngart showcases its ubiquity and the ways in which self-alienation and social alienation relate to one another in the face of President Donald Trump’s attempts to alienate and vilify immigrants and other diverse individuals in America. In the process, Shteyngart exposes missed opportunities for self-realization and invites America as a nation to subvert alienation and find success in and through its hybridity and diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigrant Experience
• Diversity
• Hybridity
• Capitalism
• Self-Realization

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Joshua Kupetz observes that “it was believed that Kerouac had conceived and written On the Road” on a now much-mythologized scroll “over three weeks in April 1951 and published it without making any significant corrections” (220). Instead, as Kupetz notes, “a skeptical reader need only compare the novel as published and the text of On the Road: The Original Scroll (2007) to understand On the Road as the product of sustained artistic endeavor” (220).

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Notes on contributors

Liliana M. Naydan

Liliana M. Naydan, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English at Penn State Abington. She is author of Rhetorics of Religion in American Fiction: Faith, Fundamentalism, and Fanaticism in the Age of Terror (Bucknell UP, 2016) and co-editor of Terror in Global Narrative: Representations of 9/11 in the Age of Late-Late Capitalism (Palgrave Macmillan 2016). Her articles on contemporary literature have appeared in numerous journals including The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Studies in American Fiction, and Studies in the Novel.