Relationships, Competition, and Power Theme Analysis

Goodbye, Columbus follows 23-year-old Neil Klugman’s brief but passionate summer relationship with 21-year-old Brenda Patimkin. While Neil and Brenda have genuine affection for one another, their relationship is plagued by constant power struggles as each one tries to take the upper hand. This is echoed by the fact that they often have literal competitions between themselves, such as running races or playing games in the pool, which reflect the power dynamic between them. Far from bringing them closer together, however, these games stir up resentment and hostility between the couple, and they end their relationship in the fall. Through Brenda and Neil’s failed relationship, Roth illustrates how romantic relationships that center around competition and power struggles breed conflict, not love, and are doomed to fail.

Brenda loves making up competitions and games to play with Neil, but instead of being the source of lighthearted fun and bonding, these competitions have serious stakes: they determine who has the upper hand in their relationship. For instance, at the beginning of their relationship, Brenda invents a game: she’ll close her eyes, and Neil can go swimming in the pool and then come back and surprise her with a wet kiss. They take turns doing this, and although Neil tries to will himself to stay away from Brenda longer and longer, he’s secretly terrified that Brenda will no longer be there when he gets back, or that on her turn, she might dip into the pool and then leave the club instead of returning to kiss him. When Brenda comes back after a particularly long turn in the pool, Neil holds her desperately and tells her that he loves her for the first time. Though the game seems innocent and fun on the surface, Brenda actually sets up a competition of who can be the most withholding; she wins by getting Neil to cave first and recognize how insecure he is about her leaving. Thus, Brenda’s game establishes a power dynamic between them wherein she holds all the power. In another example of this dynamic, later in the story Brenda instructs Neil to run with her on the nearby high school track every day, which reminds him of “one of those scenes in race-horse movies, where an old trainer like Walter Brennan and a young handsome man clock the beautiful girl’s horse in the early Kentucky morning, to see if it really is the fastest two-year-old alive.” In other words, Neil sees himself as the race-horse, and this metaphor implies several key points about their relationship. First, it suggests that Brenda is Neil’s trainer and that she has the power to condition him to be and do what she wants. Second, just as a horse’s job is to perform well for its owner, their relationship is centered on Neil’s ability to make Brenda happy, while Neil is pushed to his limits in order to please her.

Although these competitions make Neil feel like Brenda has all the power over him, he willingly engages in their power struggles, too. As the pair gets more serious about each other, Neil attempts to gain the upper hand in his own way, particularly relating to their decisions about sex. Neil describes how making love to Brenda for the first time is “so sweet, as though [he]’d scored that twenty-first point,” referring to a ping pong game he had not been able to finish earlier in the evening. Neil’s language here reinforces how he puts their sexual relationship in the context of a competition—and in this case, he is winning that game. Neil also frames sex as a game or a competition when he suggests that Brenda get a diaphragm (a contraceptive device), which involves her going to a doctor and claiming that she is married (in the late 1950s, doctors only gave this kind of birth control to married women). Neil views Brenda’s acquiring a diaphragm as a way of confirming Brenda’s commitment to him, but it also gives him power in the relationship because he is asking for control over part of her sexuality. When she is hesitant, he says that he doesn’t want to press her on it and tells her that she’s “won.” Again, he equates her agency surrounding sex with her “winning,” echoing the power struggle that Brenda’s made-up games created.

Brenda eventually relents and goes to the doctor to get a diaphragm despite being upset about it. But her refusal to take the diaphragm back to school at the end of the summer leads her mother, Mrs. Patimkin, to find it in Brenda’s dresser drawer. Mrs. Patimkin is scandalized to find out that Neil and Brenda were having sex over the summer, and Brenda feels that the only way her family will accept her again is if she breaks up with Neil. Despite Neil’s attempt to gain the upper hand, then, he still loses their relationship. After they break up, Neil asks himself, “What was it that had turned winning into losing, and losing—who knows—into winning?” He sees how their relationship had been built on this dynamic of losing and winning, and how it ultimately turned them against each other and led to its end. Thus, Roth argues that the power struggle between Neil and Brenda—reflected in their constant competitions—deprived them of cultivating the sense of equilibrium that’s necessary for a healthy, loving relationship.