Abstract

Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater (1995), a late work that registers a marked ethical turn in the author’s canon, details the memory of trauma in both content and form. It is this profound investment in memory that makes the protagonist Sabbath worthy of attention and even respect, notwithstanding his reprehensible conduct. Given that Sabbath’s Theater is heavily invested in the logic of traumatic memory, the novel preeminently invites a psychoanalytic interpretation, though its protagonist himself more than once expresses his wariness of therapy in general. Therefore, the crucial step toward such a critical intervention involves exploring the relationship between trauma, ethics, and psychoanalysis. The present paper seeks to examine Roth as an ethical thinker who in the confines of the novel enlarges our understanding of the workings of the human psyche by sidestepping the clinical scientism of psychoanalytic discourse and strategically redefining therapy as an empowering philosophy of life.

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