Source: "Good Girls and Boys Gone Bad," in Philip Roth, Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1981, pp. 9-85.

[In the following excerpt, Jones and Nance examine the themes connecting Goodbye, Columbus, "Epstein, " "Conversion of the Jews, " and "Eli, the Fanatic. "]

Goodbye, Columbus

Of Roth's major characters, Neil Klugman in Goodbye, Columbus most passively accepts the sway of casual circumstance in his life. In this, Roth's first departure from the short story, the surface plot is the familiar theme of the summer romance. Neil Klugman, the poor Jewish boy from Newark, has a summer affair with Brenda Patimkin, the affluent Jewish girl from suburban Short Hills, who is home on vacation from Radcliffe. Neil spends his vacation from his job at the library in Newark with Brenda and the Patimkin family, but the love affair dissipates after she returns to college.

The sense of temporariness and impermanence that characterizes not only the relationship between Brenda and Neil but also Neil's whole approach to life is accentuated by the summer-romance theme and the vacation atmosphere. Admitting that he is "not a planner," Neil drifts through his love affair and his job with the same lack of commitment to permanency. Life for him seems to be a kind of interlude in which nothing in the present has the cast of the future. He constantly reiterates that he does not visualize his job at the library as being forever, and although he considers the possibility of marriage to Brenda as a way to mitigate the transience of their relationship, he lacks the courage to make such a proposal.

Two important and somewhat parallel scenes in the novel illustrate the kind of "Prufrockian" timidity Neil exhibits before the two spheres of love and work in his life. In the first of these, Neil is considering the possibility that after his summer vacation he may be put in charge of the reference room. He is not particularly attracted to the stifling atmosphere of the library; yet in what he describes as his "muscleless devotion" to his work, he finds himself will-lessly "edging towards" the promotion, which he views as entrapment. It is as if he had no choice in the matter—because it is about to happen, it must happen. Visualizing this imprisonment over which he seems not to be able to exert his will, Neil considers that "life from now on would be not a throwing off, as it was for Aunt Gladys, and not a gathering in, as it was for Brenda, but a bouncing off—a numbness." At the age of twenty-three, Neil reacts to circumstance like a person etherized.

In the second scene that places in perspective Neil's passivity, his incapacity for commitment made through choice, he contemplates the prospect of asking Brenda to marry him. Living in the Patimkin house for a while, under the shadow of the preparations for Brenda's brother's wedding, reminds him that "separation need not be a permanent state." Curiously enough, but understandable in terms of his fuzzy view of commitment, Neil thinks of marriage as implying uncertainly and impermanence rather than security and union. As if it were a new realization to him, he suddenly thinks:

People could marry each other, even if they were young! . . . Well, I loved her, and she me, and things didn't seem all right at all. Or was I inventing troubles again? I supposed I should really have thought my lot improved considerably; yet, there on the lawn, the August sky seemed too beautiful and temporary to bear, and I wanted Brenda to marry me. Marriage, though, was not what I proposed to her when she drove the car up the driveway, alone, some fifteen minutes later. That proposal would have taken a kind of courage that I did not think I had.

Neil's thoughts on the subject of marriage are full of "yets" and "thoughs," and what he proposes instead of marriage is that Brenda buy a diaphragm.

In a love affair characterized largely by competition, sterility, and secretiveness, the issue of the diaphragm becomes highly symbolic. It is apparent that, in part, Neil asks Brenda to buy it in order to test her willingness to acquiesce to his demands. He wants her to "just do it. Do it because I asked you to." More important, the buying of the diaphragm comes to represent for Neil a kind of surrogate ritual performed in the absence of the religious ritual of marriage.

For Neil it is the doctor who weds Brenda to him, not the rabbi. Void of any spiritual dimension in his life and critical of the rituals in which others engage, Neil typifies that element in American culture which opts for a semblance of commitment rather than the thing itself. He is disengaged, spiritually and emotionally, and substitutes the profane for the sacramental. In a highly ironic scene that stands out as the thematic climax, Neil's spiritual vacuousness, attraction to the materialistic and acquisitive life of the Patimkins, and passive relinquishment of responsibility for his own actions emerge clearly. Waiting for Brenda to be fitted for the diaphragm, Neil wanders into St. Patrick's and begins to "make a little speech" to himself, which he calls a prayer:

God, I said, I am twenty-three years old. I want to make the best of things. Now the doctor is about to wed Brenda to me, and I am not entirely certain this is all for the best. What is it I love, Lord? Why have I chosen? Who is Brenda? The race is to the swift. Should I have stopped to think?

I was getting no answers, but I went on. If we meet You at all, God, it's that we're carnal, and acquisitive, and thereby partake of You. I am carnal, and I know You approve, I just know it. But how carnal can I get? I am acquisitive. Where do I turn now in my acquisitiveness? Where do we meet? Which prize is You?

This "little speech" under the guise of prayer shows that Roth has an ear attuned to the voices of banality and hypocrisy; when he allows a character's damnation to issue from that person's own mouth, he is at his satirical best. Neil's speech is full of clichés such as "All for the best" and "The race is to the swift" intermixed with quotations from the Bible and good old American optimism. It is also filled with emphasis on all-American materialism, the god that seems most important in the novel. In a logic that is contrived to justify his lack of true religious principle, Neil equates encountering God with some kind of ultimate expression of the appetites—both for sex and for "things." This connection between love ("carnality") and materialism ("acquisitiveness") pervades the novel. Although Neil is often critical of the acquisitiveness of the Patimkin family, he is closer to them than he would like to believe. He is not far different from Brenda's uncle, Leo, a pathetic sort of Willy Loman character, who tells a story about one of the two best things that ever happened to him, in which money and sex are linked closely. He is also not radically different from Brenda's parents, who, instead of merely connecting sex and money, make the provision of "things" the measure of parental love. For example, in a letter full of recriminations for Brenda's having betrayed the family by having sex with Neil, Brenda's mother reminds her: "But you drifted away from your family, even though we sent you to the best schools and gave you the best money could buy."

What does finally set Neil apart from the Patimkins in this scene is his inability to accept his own ingenious equation of materialism with the "prize" that is God. Ashamed of his clever but certainly profane prayer, he hears the answer to his question, "Which prize is You?" in the noise of Fifth Avenue: "Which prize do you think, schmuck? Gold dinnerware, sporting-goods trees, nectarines, garbage disposals, bumpless noses, Patimkin Sink, Bonwit Teller—"

Once again, Neil is in a kind of limbo that characterizes his condition throughout the novel. If he is reminiscent of Eliot's Prufrock in his timidity before commitment to love and work, he also recalls that character in not being truly at home in either of the two worlds he inhabits—Newark or Short Hills. Attracted to, but repulsed by, the overt acquisitiveness of the Patimkin family, with its "sportinggoods trees" and refrigerators bulging with fruit, he finally cannot commit himself fully to that world of the American Dream of success come true. Yet, at the same time, he is uncomfortable with the world represented in Newark by his Aunt Gladys, where life is a process of "throwing off." Only three choices ever seem very apparent to Neil: throwing off, taking in, and bouncing off.

The disengagement that "throwing off implies largely becomes Neil's way of encountering experience. He exemplifies what Stanley Trachtenberg sees in modern fiction as "the hero in stasis." These recent heroes, Trachtenberg suggests, are "reluctant either to confirm their own values or to accept those of society" ["The Hero in Stasis," Critique, Winter 1964-65]. We might, in fact, go one step further than Trachtenberg and say of Neil Klugman that not only is he reluctant to confirm personal or societal values, he seems to shy away from forging any values whatsoever. In his temporary migration from New Jersey and his own family to the suburbs and the Patimkin family, Neil wonders if he might not "learn to become a Patimkin with ease." Yet, finally, he finds the competitiveness of the newly upper-middle-class Patimkins as offensive as the humble acceptance of his own family. All he can manage is skepticism and an ironic view of each of these sets of values, but he can find nothing with which to replace them.

Neil's one unambivalent relationship is with a young black boy who comes to the library to look at pictures of Gauguin's paintings. Like Neil, the child is a fugitive from home, and his euphoric "that's the fuckin life" when he sees Gauguin's representations of Tahiti mirrors Neil's astonishment when he drives into the suburbs and realizes that it seemed "as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven." That he and the boy are somehow linked becomes clear to Neil when he dreams that they are on a ship anchored at an island paradise. Against their will, however, the ship begins to move out of the harbor, and the natives bid them farewell with "Goodbye, Columbus . . . goodbye, Columbus . . . goodbye. . . . " It is important to realize that Roth makes this dream seem improbably probable by connecting the "Goodbye, Columbus" to the sound of the record Neil had heard coming from Brenda's brother's room before he feel asleep. The record Ron plays is a nostalgic reminiscence about the homecoming game at Ohio State University in 1956 and other such memorable occasions, culminating in a melodramatic farewell to the university: "We offer ourselves to you then, world, and come to you in search of Life. . . . We will miss you, in the fall, in the winter, in the spring, but some day we shall return. Till then, goodbye, Ohio State, goodbye, red and white, goodbye, Columbus . . . goodbye, Columbus . . . goodbye. . . . "

Out of these two sequences, of course, Roth draws the title for his novel. Both episodes revolve around a reluctant leave-taking and a voyage into the unknown. In Neil's dream, he is a reluctant version of the explorer Columbus, and his destination is unknown to him. In Ron's record, he and the other seniors at Ohio State are to venture out from Columbus, Ohio, into the world, in search of "Life." The implications are that neither Neil nor Ron has before him a clear sense of where the voyage will culminate, but certainly for Ron there is a clearer sense of moorings to which he can return. Ron is being forced to let go of something he has actually had; Neil is cut adrift from something he knows only in a dream. Finally, Neil becomes an ironic representation of the explorer who prefers to stay within the safety of a fantasy paradise rather than chart his own mysterious future.

Through the dream sequence Neil's unconscious reflects a mode of existence that is also evident in his life. Both dreaming and waking, he is unable to will himself to any action other than drifting with the tide of circumstance. In the dream he sees himself and the little black boy on the boat, and "the boat was moving and there was nothing he could do about it." The image recalls his seemingly powerless "edging towards" what he envisions as a life of numbness in the library. It also characterizes the drift of his relationship with Brenda. Partially "wooed and won on Patimkin fruit"—on the abundance of possessions in the Patimkin way of life—Neil still seems incapable of any permanent attachment to Brenda. After her mother finds the diaphragm and it is clear that Brenda faces the crucial choice between loyalty to her parents, who equate love with material provisions, and devotion to Neil, who offers her little more than occasional sex under the name of love, the affair simply dissipates.

Neil leaves the hotel and walks to Harvard Yard, where he stands before the Lamont Library and becomes as introspective as he is ever shown to be in the novel. He looks at the image of himself in the library window, but that external image offers him no clue about what is inside him. Finally, he wonders: "What was it inside me that had turned pursuit and clutching into love, and then turned it inside out again? What was it that had turned winning into losing, and losing—who knows—into winning? I was sure I had loved Brenda, though standing there, I knew I couldn't any longer." As in his dream, the boat is moving, and Neil thinks there is nothing he can do about it. One moment he thought he loved Brenda, and now he is sure that it is no longer possible. Ironically, he does not even know whether in losing Brenda he has won or lost. He uses here the same kind of language of competition he had used earlier in his little speech to God, when he had affirmed that the "race is to the swift" and had questioned "which prize" was God.

But if this is a vocabulary that Neil has acquired during his brief exchange with the Patimkin family, it is apparent that he does not use it with the same force or conviction as that family does. He lacks the energy that Ron, the athlete, has for competition, and he lacks the gusto with which Mr. Patimkin attempts to beat out the competition in his quest for the everlasting dollar. The irony is that while Neil's inability to force himself into the Patimkin mold is certainly to his credit, he is unable to come up with any viable alternative to the values that the Patimkins represent.

Only in the last two sentences of the novel does Roth suggest the prospect that Neil may be beginning a journey away from aimless noninvolvement and toward commitment to something he has chosen; and, even there, the cryptic nature of the passage leaves its significance open to interpretation. As the sun rises on the first day of the Jewish New Year, Neil arrives back in Newark in "plenty of time for work." If, for a moment, Neil recognizes an image of his disordered life as he looks through the windows of the library and sees a "broken wall of books, imperfectly shelved," the deliberateness with which he returns to Newark and his work may mark the beginning of an attempt to arrange his life in a more meaningful pattern. John N. McDaniel suggests that at the end of the book Neil is Roth's version of the activist hero who is "still in the process of 'becoming' a fully-realized self [The Fiction of Philip Roth, 1974]. While there is little evidence of any activism on Neil's part, the ending does suggest that the reluctant "Columbus" of this book may be on the brink of becoming a somewhat more deliberate voyager.

Although it deals principally with the passivity with which its protagonist faces the risks of commitment, in tracing Neil Klugman's exodus from Newark to Short Hills and his return to Newark, Goodbye, Columbus introduces several other themes, most of which recur in Roth's fiction. Among these are the difficulties of love and communication, the confusion between generous and acquisitive instincts, the duality inherent in the necessity and yet impossibility of the family, and the tendencies toward moral and spiritual degeneration of modern American life, with the latter two ideas carrying the fullest weight of Roth's satire. Yet, ironically, the satire is realized largely through Neil's perspective. Lacking in much else, Neil is, nevertheless, clearsighted enough to recognize in the manipulations of his and Brenda's families and in the shallowness of the Patimkin affluence values that he cannot, ultimately, accept as his own. This is one of the few Roth novels in which the protagonist's parents are not a significant presence; and perhaps, in part, because Neil's parents are removed from the action of the novel by having been dispatched to the neutral territory of Arizona, Mr. and Mrs. Patimkin take center stage as the "prototypie" parents. That there is some connection between Neil's family and the Patimkin family, however, despite their differences in social status, becomes apparent when Neil meets the Patimkins at the dinner table:

Mr. Patimkin reminded me of my father. . . . He was tall, strong, ungrammatical, and a ferocious eater. When he attacked his salad—after drenching it in bottled French dressing—the veins swelled under the heavy skin of his forearm.

Described by Neil as "Brobdingnags" because of their mealtime gusto, the Patimkins are associated throughout the novel with a bounteous plenty of food and with consumption that substitutes for communication. As the observer in the novel, Neil comments:

There was not much dinner conversation; eating was heavy and methodical and serious, and it would be just as well to record all that was said in one swoop, rather than indicate the sentences lost in the passing of food, the words gurgled into mouthfuls, the syntax chopped and forgotten in heapings, Spillings, and gorgings.

The Patimkins are the exemplars of the American Dream come true. They have a table, a refrigerator, a house stuffed with material goods; they have a storeroom full of old furniture to serve as a reminder of their roots in Newark. In the language of American idealism, they have "made it"; yet despite the Patimkins' poshly educated children, nose jobs, and suburban country-club life, the relationships within the family are not particularly satisfying. Brenda fights with her mother and manipulates her father to get what she wants. She tells Neil that her father is "not too smart but he's sweet at least." For her mother, Brenda forgoes even that much kindness. She responds to her parents in terms of the goods they provide for her, and they, in turn, equate their goodness toward her with material possessions.

Hurt at the discovery that Brenda has been having an affair with Neil, both Mr. and Mrs. Patimkin write to her, and their letters show the extent to which each characteristically relates to her in terms of money. Mr. Patimkin, always protective of Brenda against her mother, urges: "Don't pay any Attention to your Mother's Letter when you get it. I love you honey if you want a coat I'll buy You a coat." There is no pause, no punctuation, between "I love you" and "I'll buy you a coat." It is as if, in the father's mind, love and buying were synonymous. Mrs. Patimkin's letter also reveals the link between love and what money provides, and makes the connection in a way that implies manipulation. Reminding Brenda that they sent her to the best schools and gave her "the best money could buy," Mrs. Patimkin concludes her letter with, "You have broken your parents' hearts and you should know that. This is some thank you for all we gave you."

The implications here are that love is a kind of commercial deal: the parents gave the daughter "things" (a measure of love), and in exchange she owes them a certain kind of behavior. Mrs. Patimkin feels betrayed because Brenda has not lived up to her end of the bargain—she has not returned the "right" behavior for what she has received. After a final argument with Neil over whether her obligation is to him or her parents, Brenda reveals the extent to which she has been bought and to which she has accepted the materialistic, impersonal, nonspiritual value system of her family: "They're still my parents. They did send me to the best schools, didn't they? They have given me everything I've wanted, haven't they?" In the end, Brenda too opts for the Patimkin version of the Great American Dream of love and money.

In defending himself against a charge of being "grimly deterministic," Roth maintains that the "business of choosing is the primary occupation of any number of my characters. I am thinking of souls even so mildly troubled as Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin, the protagonists of the novella Goodbye, Columbus." In Goodbye, Columbus the most obvious set of values to be chosen or rejected are those which the Patimkins represent. Brenda chooses the prize that comes with being the good little Patimkin daughter. Neil ultimately rejects that prize, not so much because he has consciously chosen to do so but because Brenda's rejection of him in favor of her parents makes that choice no longer accessible to him. Both attracted to and repulsed by the Patimkin acquisitiveness, Neil exists in a limbo of indecisiveness until he is forced to "look hard at the image" of himself. He then begins his journey back to Newark, which has positive implications for his finally beginning to make some order of his life.

Goodbye, Columbus: The Short Stories

Goodbye, Columbus contains not only the title piece but also five of Roth's short stories. Among these, "Epstein," "The Conversion of the Jews," and "Eli, the Fanatic" are thematically consonant with the novella in their concern with the conflicts associated with love, the family, and the difficulties of communication in a world in which materialism has replaced spirituality. These stories also introduce another theme that will pervade Roth's later books and which exists, submerged, in Goodbye, Columbus. This theme emanates from Roth's representation of the individual in a society that values "normality" and conformity more than the development of the individual. In the essay in which he maintains that choosing is the "primary occupation" of protagonists like Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin, Roth goes on to make choosing the principal activity of the characters in his short stories as well. He says:

Then there are the central characters in the stories published along with Goodbye, Columbus, "Defender of the Faith," "The Conversion of the Jews," "Epstein," "Eli, the Fanatic," and "You Can't Tell a Man by the Song He Sings," each of whom is seen making a conscious, deliberate, even willful choice beyond the boundary lines of his life, and just so as to give expression to what in his spirit will not be grimly determined, by others, or even by what he had himself taken to be his own nature.

All the major characters in these short stories, in the process of resisting the dominion of others over their lives, must also resist their own previous acceptance of the roles that the family, society, and the people they love have said they should play. As always, the struggle for the Roth protagonist is complicated by the duality of an enemy that is at the same time internal and external.

Of the three stories, "Epstein" connects most closely to the dual themes of family restraint and the conflict of the individual identity with the social expectations he and those around him have imbibed. . . .

Like many of the fathers in Roth's fiction, Epstein has accepted fully the responsibilities of citizenship, marriage, and parenthood but has missed out on pleasure. He has lived a sensible, structured life of conformity to the images his culture has taught him. Pleading his case to his nephew, Michael, after he has been banished from his own bedroom, Epstein offers the rationale that has governed his life: "All my life I tried. I swear it, I should drop dead on the spot, if all my life I didn't try to do right, to give my family what I didn't have. . . . " The irony of this statement is fully realized in the double meaning of Epstein's attempting to give what he "didn't have." The surface meaning is, of course, that Epstein has tried to provide for his family those material possessions which he had not had. But the submerged implication is that Epstein tried to give his family what he did not have to give. He has tried to give them a self duty-bound to accept the loss of his dreams—to be a "good" father and a "good" husband despite the little he receives in return. The affair with Ida, however, causes him to confront an uncharacteristic side of himself—a side that is passionate and, more significant, adulterous. As Roth points out in one of his essays, Epstein's adultery does not "square with the man's own conception of himself." Having acted in a way contrary to what he had perceived to be his own nature, Epstein sounds like so many of Roth's characters when they exceed the limits of the image that they and others have of them: "I don't even feel any more like Lou Epstein."

If Lou sees his actions as uncharacteristic, his wife regards them as positively aberrant. Ordered, meticulous, and resolute, Goldie is associated repeatedly in the story with cleanliness, restriction, and normality. When she is told by the doctor in the ambulance that Lou can recover if he will forgo trying to act like a boy and live a life normal for sixty, Goldie repeats his message as if it were an incantation: "You hear the doctor, Lou. All you got to do is live a normal life." Much of the pathos of this story turns on the meaning of the normal life. Experiencing it as attrition and restriction, Lou has, for a time, attempted to free himself; but, as Roth says in synopsizing the story, "in the end, Epstein . . . is caught—caught by his family, and caught and struck down by exhaustion, decay, and disappointment, against all of which he had set out to make a final struggle." The extent to which Epstein is caught is evident in the last lines of the story. The doctor assures Goldie that he can cure Epstein's rash "so it'll never come back," and Epstein's grim future is forecast in his words. . . .

In "The Conversion of the Jews," written when Roth was twenty-three, moral fantasy and moral fable are intertwined. As in "Epstein," Roth explores the dilemma of the individual caught by his family and in conflict with the constraints of his immediate environment, but this story is less realistically rooted than "Epstein." Elsewhere, Roth calls it a "daydream" and describes it in a way that suggests its fabulous qualities: "A good boy named Freedman brings to his knees a bad rabbi named Binder (and various other overlords) and then takes wing from the synagogue into the vastness of space." On a less mythical level, the story deals with religious myopia, cultural limitation, and power. . . .

On the level at which "The Conversion of the Jews" reads like a fable, with Ozzie Freedman's personifying the urge for individualistic freedom and Rabbi Binder the social and religious constrictions which seek to bind that freedom, the story suggests that defiance is heroic when one's soul is in jeopardy. It also illustrates in a general way, through its focus on the particular constraints imposed by the Jewish community, that the sustaining influences of family and culture are also often the most powerful forces working to inhibit the spiritual and psychological development of the individual. The soul-battered Ozzie is literally driven to defiance out of frustration when he is forced either to deny his own perceptions and be "good" or to deny the teachings of religion and family and be "bad." Such a double bind leaves him with no clear-cut options.

Bernard F. Rodgers, Jr., has suggested that a parallel exists between Ozzie's position and that of the young Roth during and after the writing of Goodbye, Columbus. He sees "The Conversion of the Jews" functioning as

an effective metaphor for the pressures of the Jewish community which combine with the self-righteousness of its young author to prompt the satiric thrust of Goodbye, Columbus itself. Rabbi Binder, Mrs. Freedman, and Yakov Blotnik personify all that Roth was determined to reject in the attitudes of the Jewish environment which had surrounded him for the first eighteen years of his life; and Ozzie Freedman's adolescent revolt against their xenophobia and closedmindedness, their constant concern for "what-is-goodfor-the-Jews," reflects Roth's own artistic revolt [Philip Roth, 1978].

Although in approaching the story metaphorically Rodgers makes some questionable assumptions about Roth's intention—that he was "determined" to reject portions of his early Jewish environment, for example—he appropriately suggests that the piece is grounded in personal experience. Roth's comments on the story indicate that he wrote from what he knew. He says that it "reveals at its most innocent stage of development a budding concern with the oppressiveness of family feeling and with the binding ideas of religious exclusiveness which I had experienced firsthand in ordinary American-Jewish life." Out of this early personal knowledge of constraint, Roth has proceeded to construct a diversity of fictional worlds in which the characters attempt to work through a dispute over control between themselves and some outside authority; thus "The Conversion of the Jews" occupies an important place in Roth's career—as the first indication of a concern that becomes pervasive.

"Eli, the Fanatic" bridges the predominant themes of "Epstein" and "The Conversion of the Jews" on the one hand and Goodbye, Columbus on the other. It recalls "Epstein" in its presentation of an uncertain and somewhat pathetic man in conflict with what he and others around him regard as normal, and it extends the "what-is-good-for-the-Jews" attitude of "The Conversion of the Jews" in a way that becomes ironic in light of the previous story. It also anticipates Roth's emphasis in Goodbye, Columbus on the moral and spiritual vacuousness of the assimilated, suburban Jew whose pursuit of the materialistic American Dream has cut him off from the sustaining aspects of Jewish culture and tradition. . . .

The story begins with Eli in conflict with Jewish orthodoxy and ends with him in conflict with modern, assimilated Jewishness. Initially, in speaking for the progressive upper-middle-class Jews of Woodenton, Eli urges Leo Tzuref and his companions to conform to the customs of the community, pointing out that the amity which Jews and Gentiles have established has necessitated that each relinquish "some of their more extreme practices in order not to threaten or offend the other." Ironically, he builds his case for conformity to these remnants of Hitlerian Germany on the notion that if Jews in prewar Europe had been less obviously Jewish—had not given offense to those in power by differentiating themselves from the "norm"—the persecution of the Jews might not have occurred. On the continuum from the "normal" to the "abnormal," the progressive Jews of Woodenton obviously stand in relation to the Orthodox Jews as the Gentiles in restrictive communities have generally stood in relation to assimilated Jews. The Gentiles have required of the Jews that they conform to traditional, normal American practices in order to live peacefully in the community, and these Americanized Jews, in their turn, require of the yeshivah members that they conform to the standards of their segment of the society in order to live satisfactorily with the Jewish community.

Seen from this perspective, the "what-is-good-for-the-Jews" motif of "The Conversion of the Jews" takes on ironic overtones in this story. In both instances, that which is good for the Jews is whatever protects the Jew from the disapproval of the "goyim"—usually inconspicuousness. In "The Conversion of the Jews," Yakov Blotnik is concerned with Ozzie Freedman's making a spectacle of himself on the roof of the synagogue, and in "Eli, the Fanatic," the assimilated Jews are concerned with the traditional Jews' making a spectacle of their religious distinctiveness.

There are significant differences, however, in the way the two stories deal with what may be called "Jewishness." In "The Conversion of the Jews," Ozzie's intellectual progressiveness is at odds with religious exclusiveness, and Roth treats his resistance to the restrictions of Jewish dogma sympathetically. His unwillingness to conform to what others want him to believe, although perhaps not good for the Jews, is represented as being good for him. In "Eli, the Fanatic," Eli's progressive acculturation is initially at odds with religious orthodoxy, and Roth treats his and the Jewish community's antipathy for Jewish exclusiveness, or distinctiveness, unsympathetically. His and his neighbors' insistence that the refugees from the yeshivah conform to their secular way of life, although perhaps good for the Jews, is represented as being insupportably restrictive and ultimately not good for the very sensitive Eli. In his own way, the unstable Eli Peck is as much an identity in flux, seeking to ground itself in an individuality of its own choosing, as the adolescent Ozzie Freedman; and when his compromised modern Jewishness comes up against uncompromising traditional Jewishness, he seems to lose his balance.

Whether Eli actually loses his balance or gains it at last depends entirely upon the perspective one chooses; and Roth has constructed the story deftly so that it supports either conclusion. What the Jewish community and Eli's family regard as insanity, Eli experiences as revelation. And because the story is clearly about identity and the standards that define it as normal or abnormal, the question of how Eli Peck is finally to be regarded is ironically consistent with the principal issue of the story. To call him insane because his behavior is inconsistent with social expectations, or to call him whole because he embraces a severed portion of his past and comes to know who he is, implies something about the perspective of the judge. At the beginning of the story, speaking for legalism and compromise in his initial encounter with Leo Tzuref, Eli is clearly associated with the Americanized Jewish community, which desires to rid itself of an obtrusive reminder of its nonmaterialistic, non-American, immoderate past. Asked by Tzuref to distinguish his position from that of the community, Eli responds, "I am them, they are me, Mr. Tzuref." He is, then, by the standards of his neighbors, sane—normal. But what Eli comes slowly to realize is that he must say of his relationship to the yeshivah the same as he has said of his relationship to the Jewish-American community: "I am them, they are me." As he begins to acknowledge his kinship with the "fanatical" Jews, his neighbors determine that he is insane.

Both the literal and the symbolic indications of Eli's identification with the Orthodox Jews and with Jewish orthodoxy revolve around clothes. Clothing, in fact, is a central metaphor in the two predominant conflicts in the story—the Jewish community's conflict with the yeshivah and Eli's internal conflict between secular and religious Jewishness. The relation of clothing and identity emerges when Tzuref responds to Eli's insistence that the greenie wear modern attire by saying, "The suit the gentleman wears is all he's got." It becomes clear that Tzuref is referring to the rabbi's identity, his connection with his past, and not to his clothes. The clothes are all that he has of what he was. Later, the connection between appearance and identity reaches its culmination when Eli and the greenie exchange clothing. Putting on the discarded clothing that the greenie has left on his doorstep, Eli feels himself transformed into a Jew. When his suburban neighbor, busy with the meaningful task of painting the rocks in her yard pink, tells him that there is a Jew at his door, Eli responds, "That's me." And when he goes up the hill to the yeshivah dressed in the greenie's garb and encounters the greenie clothed in his own best green suit, Eli at first has the notion that he is two people and then that "he was one person wearing two suits." To Eli, the intermingling of the two identities is so complete that for a moment "his hands went out to button down the collar of his shirt that somebody else was wearing." The "Doppelgänger" motif here indicates that in facing the "fanatic," the rabbinist who stands for the unassimilated Jewish tradition, Eli also confronts a part of himself—that part of his identity represented in his religious and cultural heritage.

When the rabbi, without uttering a word, points down the hill to the town of Woodenton, Eli has a revelation. It is the awareness toward which he has been moving throughout the story—the recognition that he is connected with the Jews of the yeshivah in a way that his fellow American Jews deny. His earlier words, "I am them, they are me," now refer to Old-World Jews rather than modern Jews. Like Moses descending from the mountain with a holy commission, Eli walks down the hill into Woodenton and among those who were his people. For the first time Eli seems to know who he is and to feel that he has the ability to choose. He worries for a moment that he has chosen to be crazy but then decides that it is when a person fails to choose that he is actually crazy. Therefore, he makes a conscious decision to remain in his rabbinical garb as he goes to the hospital to see his newborn son, whose birth happens to coincide with Eli's spiritual rebirth.

The story ends with the hospital attendants humoring Eli long enough to tear off his jacket and give him a sedating shot that "calmed his soul, but did not touch it down where the blackness had reached." Since Eli has associated blackness with the clothes of the rabbi, and Roth has constructed the story so that clothing stands symbolically for identity, the conclusion implies that the spiritual assimilation Eli has achieved remains untouched by sedation. In the sense that normality in this story means moderation, compromise, and alienation from the religious and cultural past, Eli will never be normal again.

In this story, as in "Epstein" and "The Conversion of the Jews," Roth explores the conflicts between conformity and identity, between the individual and his social environment, and the conflict within the individual as he makes a choice that challenges not only what others would like him to be but also his own sense of his "best self." In the introduction of these themes, the stories in the Goodbye, Columbus volume are auguries of the predominant issues to emerge in Roth's novels. Throughout his fiction, Roth is preoccupied with the moral imperatives that a person imposes on himself and their relationship to the dictates of family, culture, and religion. In the absence of heroes of epic proportion, he draws protagonists characteristically modern in the sense that their battleground is the self and their struggles are with the forces that shape, and attempt to impose limitations upon, that identity.