"Portnoy's Complaint" is a novel by Philip Roth. It was
published in 1969.
The main character of this story
is
Alexander Portnoy, and he takes a form of an accounting to his analyst, of his relationship with his suburban Jewish family. First, there is his domineering, guilt-inducing mother, followed by his weak-spirited and often constipated insurance salesman father. Lastly, there is his ever pathetic and conformist sister.
With such an environment, the life of Portnoy is ridden with guilty responses to his family's needs along with his self-conscious rebellions against them, for example, as an adolescent he performs brilliantly in school but he looks for relief and a kind of vindictive-release through constant masturbation; as an adult he has a respectable job as the Assistant Commissioner for New York City Commission on Human Opportunity, but he refuses to get married and instead he seeks gentile women, non-Jewish girls like The Pumpkin and The Pilgrim, to have affairs with.
Near the ending of the story, the self-tortured Portnoy, full of complaints and sex-obsessed, abandons his lover in Greece and travels to Israel. There he meets an Israeli girl. For the first time in his life he finds sex satisfying and love with this intellectually simple Israeli girl who confronts him with his existence, and the significance of being a noble and
sacrificing Jew.