Indignation by Philip Roth

are studying to be a lawyer. On the basis of this interview, I think you are destined to be an outstanding lawyer.” Unsmilingly now, he said, “I can see you one day arguing a case before the Supreme Court of the United States. And winning it, young man, winning it. I admire your directness, your diction, your sentence structure—I admire your tenacity and the confidence with which you hold to everything you say. I admire your ability to memorize and retain abstruse reading matter even if I don’t necessarily admire whom and what you choose to read and the gullibility with which you take at face value rationalist blasphemies spouted by an immoralist of the ilk of Bertrand Russell, four times married, a blatant adulterer, an advocate of free love, a self-confessed socialist dismissed from his university position for his antiwar campaigning during the First War and imprisoned for that by the British authorities.”
    “But what about the Nobel Prize!”
    “I even admire you now, Marcus, when you hammer on my desk and stand up to point at me so as to ask about the Nobel Prize. You have a fighting spirit. I admire that, or would admire it should you choose to harness it to a worthier cause than that of someone considered a criminal subversive by his own national government.”
    “I didn’t mean to point, sir. I didn’t even know I did it.”
    “You did, son. Not for the first time and probably not for the last. But that is the least of it. To find that Bertrand Russell is a hero of yours comes as no great surprise. There are always one or two intellectually precocious youngsters on every campus, self-appointed members of an elite intelligentsia who need to elevate themselves and feel superior to their fellow students, superior even to their professors, and so pass through the phase of finding an agitator or iconoclast to admire on the order of a Russell or a Nietzsche or a Schopenhauer. Nonetheless, these views are not what we are here to discuss, and it is certainly your prerogative to admire whomever you like, however deleterious the influence and however dangerous the consequences of such a so-called freethinker and self-styled reformer may seem to me. Marcus, what brings us together today, and what is worrying me today, is not your having memorized word for word as a high school debater the contrarianism of a Bertrand Russell that is designed to nurture malcontents and rebels. What worries me are your social skills as exhibited here at Winesburg College. What worries me is your isolation. What worries me is your outspoken rejection of long-standing Winesburg tradition, as witness your response to chapel attendance, a simple undergraduate requirement which amounts to little more than one hour of your time each week for about three semesters. About the same as the physical education requirement, and no more insidious, either, as you and I well know. In all my experience at Winesburg I have never come across a student yet who objected to either of those requirements as infringements on his rights or comparable to his being condemned to laboring in the salt mines. What worries me is how poorly you are fitting into the Winesburg community. To me it seems something to be attended to promptly and nipped in the bud.”
    I’m being expelled, I thought. I’m being sent back home to be drafted and killed. He didn’t comprehend a single word I repeated to him from “WhyI Am Not a Christian.” Or he did, and that’s why I’m going to be drafted and killed.
    “I have both a personal and a professional responsibility to the students,” Caudwell said, “to their families—”
    “Sir, I can’t stand any more of this. I feel as though I’m going to vomit.”
    “Excuse me?” His patience exhausted, Caudwell’s startlingly brilliant, crystal-blue eyes were staring at me now with a lethal blend of disbelief and exasperation.
    “I feel sick,” I said. “I feel as though I’m going to vomit. I can’t bear being