Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

182
Philip Roth
physically. At one point he finds himself mistaken for a homeless
beggar as he is reciting Shakespeare’s King Lear on the subway and
terrifies a drama student who prompts him when he forgets his lines
(300–03). Sabbath, acting the part of the insane, is mistaken for an
insane person, and his confusion between what is real (the subway)
and what is imagined (Lear? the heath? the idea that this girl might
be Nikki’s daughter?) moves Roth’s reader to both laugh at and pity
Sabbath (Safer 171–72).
Roth illustrates through the character of Lincoln, or Linc,
Sabbath’s old friend, what happens when a life does get out of control:
after a midlife crisis, Linc has become too frightened and unsure to
function in society. He is therefore exiled. Fired from his job, and
moved to a second apartment by his wife, who only communicates
via telephone, he drifts into solitary insanity. When he dies alone, his
friends suspect suicide (80). Suicide is “the taboo,” as Sabbath claims in
another context (emphasis his, 285), but once you break that, “you lie
in [your coffin] like a good little boy who does what he is told” (307).
Suicide appeals to Sabbath as a final gesture of control, but clearly it
is also one of submission to society’s expectations.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Roth presents Norman
Cowan, Lincoln’s former business partner and a man firmly tethered
to bourgeois values:
Norman was the subdued member of the duo, if not the office’s
imaginary spearhead then its levelheaded guardian against
Linc’s overreaching. He was Linc’s equilibrium. [ . . . ] The
educated son of a venal Jersey city jukebox distributor, Norman
had shaped himself into a precise and canny businessman
exuding the aura of quiet strength that lean, tall, prematurely
balding men often possess. (79)
Short, fat, untidy, and not respectable by any measure, Sabbath is his
opposite in both appearance and attitude: Norman claims to be a
happily married man, a claim Sabbath quickly dismisses since every
man thinks about killing his wife (343). Sabbath uncovers evidence
that all is not well in the Cowan household, but Norman forges ahead,
regardless of what he may or may not know about his wife’s sexual or
monetary infidelity.