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Sabbath’s Theater 185
this identity. The means by which this return is accomplished is the
contents of a box of objects marked “Morty’s things.” Sabbath steals, or
reclaims, this box from a piece of furniture in his cousin Fish’s house.
The box, and therefore the gift of Morty’s things and the link to the
past it represents, is directly tied to his mother. Its discovery conjures
her presence: the piece of furniture was his mother’s, the labeling on
the box is his mother’s, and he assumes it was his mother’s wish that
he, Mickey, should come into Morty’s possessions eventually. Driving
back to Madamaska Falls with the box beside him, the narrator asks:
“How could he kill himself now that he had Morty’s things?” (415).
It is Morty’s “things” that return him to life, rather than his foray into
the underwear collection of Norman’s daughter Debbie, referred to by
Sabbath as “her things” (emphasis his, 154).
The letters Sabbath finds in the box give Morty a voice—although
a voice that is precariously thin, even with the added significance that
they are the last five letters he wrote before being shot down in the
Phillippines, and therefore his last words. They are about as ordinary
as letters from the war can be, talking about card games and food:
“I got some bread from the mess hall and we have grape jelly so we
made hot chocolate & ate bread & jelly this evening” (408). More
interesting is the American flag that was sent to the family after
Morty’s death. Along with the track medal and the letters, the flag
emphasizes Morty’s normality, his society-approved behavior in every
situation, up to his death. Then again, going to war and being the
hero he was expected to be also got him killed, prompting Mickey
to protest his brother’s death for the rest of his life in a wild array of
taboo-breaking acts. To behave well, in Mickey’s eyes, spells death—
to behave badly, on the other hand, celebrates, indeed insists on, life.
But while Sabbath holds on to this clear division, the novel is not so
simple: Nikki’s imagined continuation of life, the hovering presence
of Sabbath’s mother, and Drenka’s ongoing presence in the novel
already suggest a much more fluid boundary between life and death;
Morty’s return (via his “things”) adds to the suspicion that death is
in some ways unreliable—and that Mickey may have less cause for
protest than he imagines.
Philip Roth has been aggravating many readers since his debut
Goodbye, Columbus, and certainly since Portnoy’s Complaint (1958,
1967). Robert M. Greenberg has pointed out that “Roth’s frustration
with his subcultural position as a Jew in American society is, in