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.
Part 1, Pages 105-185Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “There’s Nothing That Keeps Its Promises”
Part 1, Pages 105-138 Summary
On his drive down to New York City for Linc’s funeral, Sabbath considers death by suicide and tells his mother’s ghost about Nikki.
Nikki won a full scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts as a young woman. She and her mother moved to London and stayed above a hat store while she completed her studies. After graduating, Nikki returned to New York, only going back to London when her mother was dying. She died while Nikki was in the bathroom, and Nikki refused to leave her or let anyone take her body for days. Sabbath arrived and admonished Nikki for her behavior.
He finally forced Nikki to let her mother go, and a man from a funeral parlor came to prepare the body before cremation. Sabbath had to pull her away from the funeral parlor. She admitted that she’d received pills from the doctor who declared her mother dead to help her process her grief, and once she stopped taking them, she returned to normal.
In 1953, Sabbath was a finger-puppet performer on the streets of New York who performed sexually suggestive shows, even occasionally unbuttoning and caressing girls. This eventually led to an arrest and obscenity charges. It was through these performances that he met Nikki, and soon they were a theatrical team with an established theater.
Sabbath arrives in New York late and is reminded of Nikki’s disappearance and his itch to always search for her in the news. Her disappearance was part of the reason he left the city, especially after the police, FBI, and a hired detective all failed to find her. He wonders if she left because she knew about him and Roseanna. After a year of looking for her, he believed he was about to lose his mind.
One winter, when his flight was diverted to Baltimore, he looked for her in the local phonebook, as was his habit whenever he traveled. Thinking she might have simplified her last name from Kantarakis to Katris, he found an “N. Katris” and went to the address listed. No one was home and he was arrested for lurking. Only when Linc explained the situation to the police over the phone was Sabbath released, though he immediately returned to the house and asked a neighbor, who told him that his wife likely left him for someone else. For the first time, Sabbath considered that this may be the truth. Even though others assured him that Nikki was dead, he believed she was alive.
One night Nikki did not show up for a performance of Miss Julie. Sabbath was with Roseanna that night and only found out about Nikki’s disappearance when he returned home to see both Norman and Linc on the steps of his building. He did not think much of it at first, believing Nikki would come home, but his friends made him call the police.
Now, back in the city, Sabbath once again feels the pull to search for the woman he first married. His mother’s ghost finally speaks to him, admonishing him for his obsession with death and criticizing him for not knowing anything about it.
Part 1, Pages 139-185 Summary
Sabbath sits with Norman at his apartment and realizes that his obvious deterioration is making his friend uncomfortable. They discuss Nikki’s disappearance and the tragedy of it. Sabbath remembers how he drew Linc and Norman to him because of his relative poverty compared to their wealth. Realizing that he is falling apart, Sabbath begins crying, though the ghost of his mother tries to comfort him. He talks with Norman about his brother’s death and its impact on his mother and him. He talks of how the gold star placed in their window to commemorate him was nothing more than a sign of pain. He also shares with Norman that he and Roseanna are officially separated.
After the funeral, Norman lets Sabbath stay in his daughter Deborah’s room. When Sabbath hints at dying by suicide, Norman makes Sabbath promise to let him watch, though he also hints at having Sabbath hospitalized. Sabbath wonders if his breakdown is real or just another performance. Sabbath takes a bath in Deborah’s bathroom and takes a picture of her from her room with him. He also finds a tube of vaginal lubricant cream in the bathroom, and just as he settles into the bath, Norman checks on him and sees the picture. Norman is uncomfortable and, after some small talk, takes the picture back to the room and puts the cream away, though Sabbath soon retrieves both and resumes his activities.
In Deborah’s bed, Sabbath sleeps through the night for the first time in years after finding the indentation left by years of her sleeping there. He is fascinated the next morning by her panties and even takes a pair. He laments the loss of his morning erection in the aftermath of Drenka’s death and reminisces about sexual escapades in his youth. He looks out Deborah’s window and contemplates jumping, like so many artists and writers before him. He argues with his mother’s ghost, who asserts that he is an utter failure with no dignity, who even makes death a farce.
Downstairs, Sabbath finds a note saying that Norman and his wife are at work and will see him at the funeral. Norman also leaves $500, encourages Sabbath to see his psychiatrist, and warns that their cleaning lady, Rosa, is coming later. The note says that Sabbath can stay with them until he feels better. Sabbath begins searching through Deborah’s drawers for naked pictures, confident that every woman has them. He discovers a box and believes that he has found what he is looking for with a box of recipes but is disappointed to actually find recipes inside.
Sabbath hears a scream and turns to find Rosa in the doorway. She believes that he is robbing the house and thinks he has a gun in his pocket. In limited English, she begs for her life, saying that she has children and is pregnant. The scene reminds him of his early days at sea, when his friend chose a pregnant woman at a brothel. He never understood the attraction, though now he grows curious. She leads him to Norman and Michelle’s room, where she shows him an envelope hidden with money and another with nude photos of Michelle. He admires the photos before returning them to the envelope and explaining who he is. They agree to not share their interaction with Norman and Michelle.
To explain his search through Deborah’s drawers, Sabbath tells Rosa that he was looking for his glass eye. He gives Rosa two $50 bills and lets her touch his eye. He wants to be sexual with her and even contemplates making a move. He begins to think that they will have sex, and he decides that afterward, he will die by suicide. She cleans the room up for him and Sabbath breaks down in tears. Rosa cradles him in her bosom. As he cries, Sabbath remembers a case in which a woman cuts off her husband’s penis in a fit of rage and how invested Roseanna was in it. He uses this as another justification for leaving her, to escape all the scissors at her disposal.
Part 1, Pages 105-185 Analysis
Sabbath is not the only character in Sabbath’s Theater to experience The Power of Loss and Grief. When his first wife, Nikki, loses her mother, she flies to London and becomes a different person, whose grief makes Sabbath deeply uncomfortable. Her transgressive behavior is a reaction to the shock of the loss, but also a radical departure from what Sabbath expects of her:
What I was trying to tell her was that the vigil she had initiated over the body had exceeded my sense not of what was seemly but of what was sane. I was trying to tell her that her unconstrained intimacy with her mother’s corpse […] was rendering her taboo to me (108).
Sabbath is disturbed by Nikki’s intimacy with her mother’s corpse. She speaks to it and touches it frequently, as if her mother were still alive. Not only is this taboo behavior, but it also reminds him of his own mother’s refusal to accept the death of a loved one. Sabbath understands the pain of loss, but he refuses to lose another loved one to grief.
These chapters deepen the exploration of Desire as a Guiding Force in Sabbath’s life. Sabbath desires sex, but this does not mean that desire in his life is always tied directly to it. Sabbath loves desire itself and follows it wherever it leads him: “He wanted to do what he wanted to do. This was his cause and it led to his arrest and trial and conviction, and for precisely the crime he’d foreseen in the meat-grinder skit” (123). Not only does his desire lead him into multiple affairs, but it also results in an obscenity trial and later, a sex scandal and public disgrace. Despite these outcomes, he refuses to let his pursuit of desire be tempered by shame or guilt, committing to living his life the way he wants to and accepting whatever consequences arise from his actions. Desire lies at the heart of his character, and without it, he is not Sabbath.
Sabbath is an artist, and art helps him make sense of his life when he is younger and actively performing. However, as he confronts The Stress of Aging, he becomes more and more disheartened and cynical about his position in life, losing the artistic purpose and vision that once defined him. When he sits with Norman, he realizes that aging has changed his status as an artist: “And though nobody knowing or caring was another form of artistic suffering, in his case it had no artistic meaning. He was just someone who had grown ugly, old, and embittered, one of billions” (143). Sabbath is used to finding the artistic value in any situation, even considering death by suicide a comedic act, but old age erases his unique artistic identity. His body changes, which impacts his ability to pursue his sexual desires. The bitterness that takes hold of him after Drenka’s death and the scandal at his old college leaves him not a tortured artist but a cranky old man, one of many marred by the ravages of time.
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