Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Sabbath’s Theater 179
reeling in an audience with fingers (rather than actual puppets) and
enticing Helen Trumbull, a female audience member, to allow his
finger/puppet to unbutton her blouse. Arrested for this initial moral
transgression, Sabbath goes to court, where his friends Norman
Cowan and Lincoln Gelman help him get off with a fine. He then
becomes director of a very small theater group, again controlling the
actions of others, and marries a young actress, Nikki, who mysteriously
disappears. Sabbath then pursues a second marriage with Roseanna,
with whom he is already having an affair.
They move to Madamaska Falls, a small town in the country,
where Sabbath holds a teaching position at a college. He has affairs
with several female students and is fired when his last affair, with a
student named Kathy Goolsbee, becomes public. The scandal drives
Roseanna into a rehab clinic, which does not improve the marriage.
The main focus of Sabbath’s past 13 years has been his attachment
to Drenka Balich, a Croatian immigrant and the local innkeeper’s
wife. After Drenka, whom he loves and who is clearly more his equal
than any of the other women in his life, dies of cancer toward the
beginning of the novel, Sabbath’s life gets a jolt: Roseanna throws
him out of the house, and Sabbath drives to New York to attend
Lincoln’s funeral. After a visit to Norman, who also throws him out,
Sabbath gets sidetracked into searching for his family’s graves, visits
his ancient cousin Fish, and returns to Madamaska Falls for one
last visit to Drenka’s grave. At the closing of the novel, Sabbath is
still a breaker of taboos, but his reflections and travels seem to have
prompted some internal shifts.
Beginning with his Indecent Theater career, all of Sabbath’s
transgressions are tied in with performances—Sabbath seems to be
particularly pleased when others observe his overstepping of boundaries.
He depends both on an audience (even if it is only the reader of
Sabbath’s Theater) and on other characters. With his career as a theater
director long behind him, unable to manipulate puppets with his now
rheumatic fingers, Sabbath instead pulls the strings of those around
him: his student Kathy Goolsbee, his wife Roseanna, his old friend
Norman, his friend’s wife Michelle, his lover Drenka. Each of them
in turn he challenges to join him in breaking taboos, but in each case
he also loses control over his “puppet.” This is most obvious in the case
of Kathy, with whom he has a brief affair involving phone sex (its own
version of manipulation). Kathy “accidentally” leaves a tape recording