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SABBATH’S THEATER
(PHILIP ROTH)
,.
“The Taboo in Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater”
by Julia F. Klimek, Coker College
When Philip Roth’s novel Sabbath’s Theater won the National Book
Award in 1995, readers and critics responded with some ambivalence.
Those who found the sexual shenanigans of Portnoy’s Complaint
(1967) offensive and reprehensible were even less amused by Roth’s
protagonist Mickey Sabbath, whose exploits, both fantasized and
realized, surpass Portnoy’s by far. According to Mark Shechner, even
the award committee was impressed by the abrasive and insulting
nature of the novel but decided that art in literature can and should
be challenging (Shechner 147). Sabbath’s Theater challenges the most
seasoned Roth reader with its long list of taboos broken, transgressions
enacted and imagined, and its general spirit of unapologetic defiance,
both in the face of society’s morals and of mortality itself. The taboos
are manifold: infidelity, phone sex with a student, alcohol smuggled
into a recovery clinic, a gleeful rummage through the underwear of
a friend’s teenage daughter, theft, desecration of a grave (multiple),
incest, suicide—Roth’s characters behave badly.
Roth ascribes most of the transgressions to his main character,
Sabbath, but others participate and collude, and in fact it is
Sabbath’s aim to draw in fellow transgressors. Sabbath manipulates
and corrupts others into joining him in the breaking of taboos. He
is driven by a fear of death and a wish to reach beyond its finality.
Sabbath is traumatized by losses he cannot accept: first the death of
his older brother Morty when he is still a boy, later the disappearance
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