Source: "Nice Jewish Boys: The Comedy of Goodbye, Columbus and the Early Stories," in Philip Roth Revisited, Twayne Publishers, 1992, pp. 13-36.

[In the following excerpt, Halio explores the dark humor present in each of Goodbye, Columbus 's five short stories.]

None of the five short stories collected along with Goodbye, Columbus in Roth's first published volume has quite the same range of wit and humor as the novella. But if "The Conversion of the Jews" is in part a ludicrous melodrama and "Epstein" borders on the tragic, they also reveal not only Roth's own moral earnestness but his witty perception into the contradictions and inconsistencies of human lives—elements that can make men and women simultaneously comic and pathetic, funny and sad. In "The Defender of the Faith" Roth opened himself to accusations of anti-Semitism, or Jewish self-hate, accusations he has rejected, arguing vigorously in defense of the artist's freedom to pursue and present truth as he sees it and of the universal, not peculiarly Jewish, nature of his theme ["Writing about Jews," Commentary, December 1963]. Yet the story is essentially comic, its humor underlying and occasionally covering over the darker elements of its characters and situations. "You Can't Tell a Man by the Songs He Sings" has nothing particularly Jewish in it, but "Eli the Fanatic" contains much of the dark humor found in "The Defender of the Faith."