John Franzen's The Discomfort Zone

JONATHAN FRANZEN’S THE DISCOMFORT ZONE – A Personal History - analysis of one man's identity

by V

Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone is essentially a collection of Franzen's essays published in The New Yorker that deal with problems, life – time experiences, both social and emotional aspect of the author's life. This essay will focus mainly on Franzen's effectual attempt to create a self – portrait and at the same time make it legible and comprehensive in a way that anyone could cope with the problems and experiences he had during his maturation. The book contains six essays : “House for Sale“, “Two Ponies“, “Then Joy Breaks Through“, “Centrally Located“, “The Foreing Language“ and “My Bird Problem“ which are written in an autobiographical,
The opening part of this section actually provides a hint about the relationships inside the Franzen family. He was growing up alongside his two brothers, Tom and Bob, whom he appreciated and respected infinitely. According to Jonathan, Tom is a true representative of the social epidemic of that era, a rebellious adolescent who ran away from home in a search for his own identity:

„ Late adolescents in suburbs like ours had suddenly gone berserk, running away to other cities to have sex and not ot go to college, ingesting every substance they could get..For a while, the parents were so frightened...and so ashamed that each family, especilly mine, quarantined itself and suffered by itself...Tom's bed, neatly made, was the bed of a kid carried off by the
Together with his parents, he visits his brother Bob at his dorm room, and immediately after the visit, accidentally or not, he becomes interested in reading pornographic magazines, such as Rouge, but finds the pictures not as interesting as the stories in it. Curiously enough, after being stunned by Schulz’s Peanuts, thanks to his favorite professor Avery, he begins to focus mainly on the works of Kafka and Mann. Reading “The Process”, he engages himself entirely in the story of Joseph K., and after having discussed it with Avery, he found out that Kafka’s novel was more or less the story about him: “Kafka was afraid of death, he had problems with sex, he had problems with women, he had problems with his job, he had problems with his parents. And he was writing fiction to try to figure these things out.”(140) It was precisely Avery who helped him understand Kafka in his essence: “...all three of the dimensions in Kafka: that a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and lascivious, self – aggrandizing, grudge – bearing bore, and also, crucially, a third thing: a flicker consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self – reproach, a person in