Sight and the City: Arthur Miller's "Focus" and Philip Roth's "Nemesis"

The goal of this essay is to investigate the relationship between eyesight and the urban setting in two works set during and immediately after the Second World War: Arthur Miller’s first and only full-length novel, "Focus", published in 1945, and Philip Roth’s last novella, "Nemesis", that came out in 2010. Both works proceed along the pathway opened by F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby", widening his reflections and adjusting his perspective to the atmosphere of the American metropolis in the Forties; both revolve around bespectacled characters with bad eyesight, whose literal failure to see the city and its true nature becomes also metaphorical.