Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Goodbye, Columbus, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Relationships, Competition, and Power
Assimilation and Wealth
Self-Delusion and Fantasy vs. Self-Examination and Reality
Nostalgia vs. Progress
Summary
Analysis
After Brenda’s return to school, she and Neil have a difficult time figuring out the best way to communicate on the phone or through letters. When Neil returns to the library, he is scolded by Mr. Scapello for his treatment of the older gentleman, but Neil manages to wriggle out of punishment by offering a confused story, managing to make it so that Mr. Scapello apologizes to Neil. Neil thinks that perhaps he learned the technique from Mr. Patimkin when he was on the phone that day in his office. He thinks that perhaps he could be a businessman.
The fact that Neil thinks that he could have the makings of a businessman emphasizes both the amount that he has assimilated to the culture of Brenda’s family—picking up on habits from Mr. Patimkin—and his continued aspiration to be included in it. He hopes that by proving himself a worthy businessman (and thus attaining wealth), he can be accepted by the family.
Themes
Days pass; the Gauguin book is checked out, and so Neil no longer sees the little boy in the library. Neil wonders whether the boy was very upset. Neil thinks that it’s better for him not to dream of Tahiti if he can’t afford to get there. As Neil goes about his days, he faces a sense of emptiness without Brenda there.
Neil now recognizes that the boy’s fantasies have been unrealistic and unproductive—and that by recognizing reality, one can build more realistic dreams and thoughts about the future. Yet even though Neil recognizes this in the boy’s situation, he doesn’t fully recognize this in himself yet.
Themes
Soon, Brenda writes that she will be coming in for the Jewish holidays, which are a week away. Neil is elated, but two days later, Brenda calls Neil, apologizing because she realizes that she can’t come back for the holidays: she has a test and a paper due soon, and she needs to be at school. She asks if Neil can come up to Boston, suggesting he use the holidays as an excuse to take off. Neil says he can’t, because Aunt Gladys is having the family for dinner and his parents are coming in.
Brenda’s request that Neil miss spending the Jewish new year with his parents is another example of Neil’s conflict between assimilation into Brenda’s life and honoring his own family’s Jewishness. The further he moves towards her, the further away he moves from his own family and culture.
Themes
Brenda ignores Neil’s protests, saying that she got a hotel room for them. Neil then considers this, saying that he could take a train Wednesday night and then would have to be back to work on Saturday. Aunt Gladys shouts from another room, telling him not to be on the phone long distance for too long. Neil angrily tells Brenda that he’ll come. She tells him not to be upset, saying that he should be able to take off for the holidays. Neil says goodnight, and he tells Brenda he loves her.
This is yet another struggle for power that Brenda wins. By renting a hotel for the two of them, Brenda uses the promise of sex to manipulate Neil into coming up to Boston, rather than offering to come to see him or respecting his obligation to be with family.
Themes
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When Neil tells Aunt Gladys he’s going away for Rosh Hashana, she cries. Aunt Gladys argues that Brenda would come home to see her family if she loved them. Neil says that Aunt Gladys doesn’t understand, to which she replies that she’ll understand when she’s 23 years old. The next morning, Neil manages to get Mr. Scapello to agree to let him leave.
Aunt Gladys continues to recognize that the more Neil assimilates to the Patimkins, the more he moves away from their family. Additionally, she notes that Brenda doesn’t seem to care about her own Jewish heritage, because she isn’t coming home to spend time with her family during the holidays. In this way, Roth reinforces the fact that Brenda’s wealth has moved her away from her heritage, and that Neil is following the same path.
Themes
Neil arrives in Boston on Wednesday night, and Brenda meets him at the station. He’s excited to see her, although for the first minute he barely recognizes her. They take a cab to the hotel, where he signs the register as Mr. and Mrs. Neil Klugman. When they get inside the room, Neil notices that her heart is pounding. Neil asks Brenda if there’s something wrong. She turns away from him, and he comes up behind her and embraces her, realizing in the moment that the real reason that he came up to Boston is because he wants to ask Brenda to marry him.
Despite all of Neil’s prior hesitations about not fully knowing Brenda, and his and Brenda’s arguments, he continues to idealize their relationship in his desire to marry her. This would represent an easy end to their conflict and an easy path to success in his life, but it also represents a misunderstanding of reality. Any time he tries to evaluate his love for Brenda, he realizes that he might not actually love her as a person, but he pushes those thoughts away in favor of deluding himself.
Themes
Brenda then reveals that Mr. and Mrs. Patimkin found out about her and Neil sleeping together over the summer, because her mother found her diaphragm at home. Both Mr. and Mrs. Patimkin had sent her letters, which she shows to Neil. Her father had told her that he doesn’t want to shut her out from the family, but that he wants her to move on from this mistake. Mrs. Patimkin’s letter is more distraught, saying that she doesn’t know why Brenda would treat the family in this way and that she doesn’t know what kind of home life Neil has for him to betray their hospitality towards him.
Mr. and Mrs. Patimkin’s letters both imply that for her to remain connected to their family, Brenda must cut ties with Neil. Thus, after all of the power struggles between Neil and Brenda, ultimately that competition comes to an end through her parents. Mrs. Patimkin in particular returns to the attitude that Neil’s behavior is an extension of his class and upbringing, reasserting the socioeconomic barrier between Neil and Brenda.
Themes
After reading both letters, Neil asks Brenda why she left the diaphragm at home. Brenda says that she didn’t plan on using it at school and thought she’d go home to see Neil before he came up to see her. Neil says that doesn’t make any sense and starts to get angry, saying that she should have expected someone to find it. Brenda is taken aback, saying that his questions make it sound like she wanted her mother to find it. They argue further until Neil admits that he thinks Brenda left it for her mother to find. Brenda is furious and starts crying.
Here Neil and Brenda finally face the fallout of their power struggles—particularly Neil’s desire to control Brenda’s commitment and sexuality. Even though Neil gained the upper hand by asking her to get the diaphragm, it has led to a deep and ultimately irreparable rift in their relationship.
Themes
Neil rereads Mr. Patimkin’s letter, and notes that he suggests that Brenda bring home her roommate Linda for their Thanksgiving dinner. Neil asks who Brenda will bring home. Brenda wonders whether she could bring Neil home to her family again. Neil says that if she can imagine it, he can imagine it. She says that she can’t disobey her parents after they’ve given her so much in life.
Brenda’s response here illustrates another difference between them: that while Neil would gladly choose her over his family, Brenda would not make the same choice. This choice illustrates how Neil is able to assimilate because of Brenda’s wealth, whereas Brenda does not want to choose Neil over her family because she would lose the wealth that has enabled her current life.
Themes
Neil again returns to accusing Brenda of leaving the diaphragm for Mrs. Patimkin to find, implying that Brenda wanted to ruin their relationship. She says that he’s the one who has been creating conflict in their relationship, asking her why she doesn’t get more of herself “fixed,” as though it is her fault that she has the money to have her nose fixed. She says that he kept acting as if she were going to run away from him any minute. He says he loved her, so he cared about her. She replies that she loved him, and that’s why she got the diaphragm in the first place.
Brenda finally confronts Neil about the fact that he both idealized Brenda’s life and also resented it. His insecurity in their relationship might not have come from any ambivalence on Brenda’s end; it seems like it came only from his own lack of confidence and the fact that he might not fully fit into the kind of life that she lived. In not confronting his own feelings about why he loved her, he enabled this insecurity to poison their feelings toward each other through an attempt to make her commit to him. Thus, both their competitions and the unrealistic nature of Neil’s fantasy undermined their relationship.
Themes
Neil packs up his bag and leaves Brenda in the room crying. Instead of grabbing a cab, he walks along Harvard Yard. He stands in front of Lamont Library, seeing his dark reflection in the glass in the front of the building. He has an urge to pick up a rock and throw it through his glass reflection. He wonders what had turned “pursuit and clutching into love” and why their relationship had been so plagued by winning and losing.
Here, Neil finally comes to the self-reflection that he needed to understand his relationship with Brenda. He realizes how it has been ruined by competitions, and how he conflated the pursuit of her idealized life and the sense that he truly loved her as a person.
Themes
Neil knows that he loved Brenda, but he also knows that he can’t keep loving her. He wonders if he will be able to find such passion with anybody else. He wishes that she had been slightly different, but then he wonders if he would have loved her the same way if she hadn’t been Brenda. He looks at the image of himself in the glass, and then through it, to the books in the library. Then he leaves and boards a train that gets him into Newark as the sun is rising on the first day of the Jewish New Year. He is back in time for work.
Neil is wondering whether he could love anyone else in the same way, but he doesn’t answer this question, even though he is narrating from a future time. In this way, Roth leaves open the question of whether Neil is looking back on this story only with nostalgia, or whether Neil is appreciating the progress he has made in the interim. Additionally, the fact that he is literally looking at his face in the glass as he comes to these realizations makes literal the fact that he is finally moving past delusions and taking a hard look at what he really wants and who he really is. He understands that his true desire is to end his relationship with Brenda. In then returning to work on the Jewish New Year, Roth concludes Neil’s story with a symbolic return to his heritage and his socioeconomic status by turning away from Brenda’s wealth.
Themes
