Goodbye, Columbus: Roth's portrait of the narcissist as a young man

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2005 by Peter L. Rudnytsky

Whether or not Roth actually dreamed the dream that he gives to Neil Klugman, as he dreamed the dream in Patrimony, is impossible to say. Clearly, he either dreamed Neil's dream or made it up, so either way it arose out of his unconscious, and thus its ontological status is of secondary importance. Still, the uncanny resemblances between the two dreams seem to me to weigh strongly in favor of the hypothesis that Roth did indeed have such a "Goodbye, Columbus" dream in real life, and that he can therefore in this respect be literally identified with his fictional protagonist. In any event, this juxtaposition of the two dreams separated by more than 30 years takes us into the heart of Roth's unconscious--into his imagination of disaster, his equation of separation with death, and the primordial screen memories of his childhood.

It remains for me now to trace out how the tragic ending of Neil's relationship to Brenda, foreshadowed by this anxiety-dream evoked by her declaration of love for him (as well as by the news of her brother's impending marriage), plays itself out in the final sections of the novella. The next important episode is the quarrel arising from Neil's request that Brenda obtain a diaphragm. As I have noted, this leads to their first serious breach, though equilibrium is restored when Brenda later decides to give Neil what he wants. What is crucial to consider is how Neil's idea about the diaphragm occurs to him as a response to "the union of Harriet and Ron," which he says "reminded me that separation need not be a permanent state" (78). Indeed, Neil expressly affirms, "I wanted Brenda to marry me," though he immediately adds that marriage "was not what I proposed to her." Claiming to fear the possibility of rejection, or even being asked by Brenda to wait, Neil supposes that this is why he "proposed the surrogate, which turned out finally to be more daring than I knew at the time."

Neil's proposal concerning the diaphragm, then, is explicitly described as a "surrogate" for a marriage proposal, and the diaphragm itself is a substitute for the permanent commitment. In psychoanalytic terms, the diaphragm is a symptom, a classic example of a compromise formation that expresses at once his desire for and fear of marriage. The request reflects Neil's desire for marriage in that it is a bold step, a test of their relationship and of Brenda's feelings for him, and of course it has to do with sex. But it reflects his fear of marriage in that it is conspicuously not a marriage proposal, and indeed threatens to derail his and Brenda's progress toward this goal. Again, to borrow Freud's extremely helpful language, a process of displacement is at work, which shows by the similarity between the thing itself and the "surrogate" the force of Neil's desire, but also reveals by their difference the countervailing force of his fear. In another vicious circle, Neil's fear of separation, and the hope that it "need not be a permanent state," leads him to think of marriage; but his fear of commitment leads him to propose the diaphragm instead, which drives him back toward the isolation that initiated the merry-go-round with Brenda in the first place.