46 pages • 1 hour read
Philip RothSabbath's Theater
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Stress of Aging
Throughout Sabbath’s Theater, Sabbath and other characters wrestle with what it means to get older. Faced with the realization that life is almost over, they experience guilt, fear, and regret, and these strong emotions often lead them to make rash decisions. When Sabbath visits Norman and they discuss Linc’s death by suicide, Norman attributes Linc’s depression to aging: “I know a number of men our age, right here in Manhattan, clients, friends, who’ve been going through crises like this. Some shock just undoes them around sixty—the plates shift and the earth starts shaking” (81). For Sabbath, the “shock” is Drenka’s death, which forces him to confront his own aging body and decide whether he wants to keep living. Faced with his mortality, Sabbath feels he must either recreate himself and his life or bow out.
For Sabbath, aging is closely tied to the loss of sexuality. Sex is a major factor in Sabbath’s life. It is not only a release for him but also a form of expression—both in his personal life and in his artistic career—and without it, his perception of himself unravels. Not only has Drenka’s death robbed him of his most meaningful sexual relationship, but changes to his aging body impact how frequently and with whom he can have sex. Sabbath sees the loss of sex as possibly the most severe side effect of aging and recognizes others’ fear and regret surrounding that loss. When he begins courting Michelle, hoping to fill the void left by Drenka’s death, he believes he has found a kindred soul:
Sabbath understood her state of mind, her state of life, her state of suffering: dusk is descending, and sex, our greatest luxury, is racing away at a tremendous speed, everything is racing off at a tremendous speed and you wonder at your folly in having ever turned down a single squalid fuck (306).
Sabbath believes that Michelle, like him, is mourning the end of sex because it represents the end of life itself. Sabbath’s fear of aging and death pushes him to be more adventurous now, risking relationships as a way to “beat” old age.
Desire as a Guiding Force
For some characters in the novel, desire can have a complicated relationship with other emotions, with many recognizing that the pursuit of desire often leads to guilt. For Sabbath, however, desire is a guiding light; he pursues his desires without regret or guilt, often demonstrating a unique tenacity when that desire is related to sex: “The core of seduction is persistence. Persistence, the Jesuit ideal […] You must devote yourself to fucking the way a monk devotes himself to God” (60). Having sex is the goal of Sabbath’s life, and through experience, he learns that he can achieve this goal through hard work. In this instance, he is pursuing Christa. Sabbath understands that if he can keep her talking long enough, not only will she open up to him, but he will also find common ground with her, and thus an excuse for seeing her again. Here as elsewhere, Sabbath pursues his desires with a single-minded, almost religious zeal.
Drenka is the other character in the novel who pursues her desires with such fervor. She, like, Sabbath, has sex with many people and rarely lets guilt or regret stop her from living out her fantasies. When she is on her death bed, speaking with Sabbath, she shares with him the role desire plays in their relationship as well as how her lack of regret with him proves how special he is to her. She tells him about her feelings about them urinating on each other: “Maybe what I was worried about was that I would regret it. There are many times when one has ideas to do things or maybe you get led in to do something, and afterward there’s a sense of shame […] And now I even love to talk about it with you” (427). Drenka feels a certain amount of reservation about pursuing this particular fantasy, believing that it may lead to regret or change how they feel for one another. However, because they share the same commitment not only to sex and desire but also to each other, it brings them closer together. Drenka experiences an often-shameful moment as one of union. Her desire leads her to a partner she can trust and love.
The Power of Loss and Grief
Sabbath’s life is marked by loss. As a young child, he loses his beloved older brother to war, and he subsequently loses his mother to grief. As a young man, he loses his first wife as well. When Nikki disappears, Sabbath becomes obsessed with finding her, but he realizes his obsession is leading him down a dark path. He often visualizes finding her as she was when she disappeared, pained by thinking that she may have moved on. As this obsession drives him toward instability, he forces himself to stop and move on, wresting himself from the powerful grip his grief has on him.
The power of grief is so strong that it changes the trajectory of Sabbath’s life more than once. When he loses Nikki, he tries to find her until he begins to break down and moves to Massachusetts. Decades later, another moment of grief sparks a radical change in his life, when he finds his brother Morty’s possessions:
The pure, monstrous purity of the suffering was new to him, made any and all suffering he’d known previously seem like an imitation of suffering. This was the passionate, the violent stuff, the worst, invented to torment one species alone, the remembering animal (403).
As he familiarizes himself with his brother’s belongings and confronts his memories of him, Sabbath feels a change come over him. Leading up to this moment, Sabbath has been convinced that he must die by suicide, no longer seeing no point in living. Now, however, with his brother’s belongings in his possession, he grieves all over again, and his grief is so profound that he reverses course, committing himself to staying alive so he can protect his brother’s belongings. Sabbath realizes that the pain of a loss is just as powerful as the pull of desire in shaping his life.
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