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

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

A further crucial feature of Neil's proposal about the diaphragm is that it is experienced by Brenda as degrading. "You think there would be something affairish about it," she says. "Last summer I went with this whore who I sent out to buy--" (82). It is this outburst that leads Neil to call her a "selfish egotistical bitch," and Brenda to respond by asking why he doesn't "take turns" with her mother in plaguing her. Given the hidden motives behind Neil's idea of this "surrogate" and the crude way he presents it to Brenda, there can be no doubt that she is right in her perceptions. Neil is indeed trying to turn her into a "whore," and their relationship into "something affairish."

If that is the case, the question then inevitably arises of why he would do this. The answer is that Neil desires to degrade Brenda precisely in order that she will be unfit to marry, and he will then be justified in rejecting her. In other words, he is creating the conditions that guarantee the relationship will fail, and he does so by imposing a humiliating test on the beloved. If she refuses to comply with his demand, she has shown (in his mind) that she does not love him; but if she passes the test, she has failed on a deeper level by her abjectness, which is bound over time to induce resentment in her and contempt in him. Either way, she remains for him an object of his fantasy rather than an independent person in her own right; and the relationship, instead of being based on mutual recognition, becomes a power struggle in which one party must win and the other lose. "I can't win, no matter what I say," Brenda exclaims in frustration; and the scene ends with Neil's reply: "'Yes you can,' I said. 'You have'" (85).

In Freud's classic psychoanalytic model based on the Oedipus complex, the son's desire for the mother is split into "sensual" and "affectionate" currents, and the interference of the incest taboo makes it difficult for a man to reunite these two currents of love in his feelings for the same woman in adult life. (3) From this standpoint, the problem Brenda poses for Neil is paradoxically that she is perfect: by affording him the possibility of integrating sex and love, passion and affection, she threatens to undo the split in the mother image that is his bulwark against the incest wish. As Neil ruminates on the final page of the narrative, "Whatever spawned my love for her, had that spawned such lust too? If she had only been slightly not Brenda ..." (136). Here we see him celebrating Brenda as the one woman who can combine his "love" and "lust," but, by the twisted logic of the unconscious, must for that very reason be rejected. If only she had been different in some way, it might have lasted; but then she would had something wrong with her so it couldn't have lasted either.

After Neil and Brenda's initial quarrel over the diaphragm, the narrative moves inexorably to its denouement. Neil visits Brenda's father at his warehouse and later attends Ron's wedding to Harriet. On both occasions Mr. Patimkin sends clear signals that he would be glad to have Neil in the family, though a cynical note is struck at the wedding by Mr. Patimkin's half-brother Leo. Even while jocularly admonishing Neil "don't louse it up" (108) and assuring him that "next time we see you it'll be your wedding" (117), the intoxicated Leo complains both about his job as a traveling lightbulb salesman and the fact that his wife does not enjoy sex. He fondly recalls a time years ago in San Francisco when a woman with whom he took a taxi ride told him in her room that "she believes in oral love" (116). Leo clearly expresses the negative pole of Neil's own ambivalence toward marriage and the lure of women who promise to satisfy him sexually in a way that his wife will not or cannot. Between Neil's visit to Patimkin Sinks and the wedding, Brenda changes her mind about the diaphragm, and Neil accompanies her to New York City where she has made a doctor's appointment. While Brenda is having her appointment, Neil wanders into St. Patrick's Cathedral and, in a continuation of his earlier allusion to the diaphragm as a "surrogate" for marriage, somewhat oddly prays to himself: "Now the doctor is about to wed Brenda and me, and I am not entirely certain this is all for the best. What is it I love, Lord?" (100).