Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth Chapters 1-3 - Analysis and Response

Themes

·       Aunt gladys's English is botched: 

    

    “You’re going to call her you don’t know her?”

·       Aunt Gladys criticizes everything

·       Preoccupation with the body: plastic surgery, fix the eyes, Brenda is myopic…

“Where did you get those fine shoulders? Do you play something?”

“No,” I said. “I just grew up and they came with me.”

“I like your body. It’s fine.”

·       Language creates reality: 

     Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them—at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them.

·       Metafiction, self-reflexivity, awareness of style

·       Imagining the future

·       Senescence

·       Race and skin color

People and Places

·       Neil

·       Brenda Patimkin

·       Aunt Gladys

·       Doris the cousin

·       Laura Simpson Stolowich "Simp"

·       Uncle Max

·       Carlota the maid (a Navajo-Negro)

·       Ron Brenda's brother

·       Julie Brenda's sister

Response

·       Altogether unwittingly, he had activated the ambivalence that was to stimulate his imagination for years to come and establish the grounds for that necessary struggle from which his—no, my—fiction would spring.

He talks about himself in the third person in the introduction, indicating that he no longer identifies with his old self. However, he does claim present ownership of the fiction that the previous roth wrote. Narcisism? Wanting to have it all?

·       Maybe Brenda has daddy issues; she gets her nose fixed so she doesn't resemble her dad: 

    “It was bumpy.”

“A lot?”

“No,” she said, “I was pretty. Now I’m prettier. My brother’s having his fixed in the fall.”

“Does he want to be prettier?”

She didn’t answer and walked ahead of me again.

“I don’t mean to sound facetious. I mean why’s he doing it?”

“He wants to … unless he becomes a gym teacher … but he won’t,” she said. “We all look like my father.”

·       He's jewish, and has shikse fantasies (albeit imperfect) Brenda among them was elegantly simple, like a sailor’s dream of a

Polynesian maiden, albeit one with prescription sun glasses and the last name of Patimkin.

·       They are both self-centered: Neil complains she didn't ask how he feels and calls her egotistical

and the high walls of ego that rose buttresses and all between her and her knowledge of herself

·       Difference in lower class and upper class, assimilated dinner conversation (nagging vs baseball)

·       Patimkin's Jewish: Mrs.

Patimkin is directing Carlota not to mix the milk silverware and the meat silverware again

·       When Neil plays basketball with Julie everyone's watching; it's like a rite of passage and he loses.

Philip Roth