Working class Neil is captivated by wealthy Brenda. His desire for her is both sexual and material—he longs to have the kind of life that her upper-class family leads. However, as the pair’s relationship unfolds, Roth hints at the fact that Neil is simply living out a fantasy through his relationship with Brenda. The two are not suitable for one another, and Neil is with Brenda not because he loves her for who she is, but because he’s enamored with the idea of what his life might be if he married her. Over the course of the novella, Neil gradually develops self-awareness about his own motives and values, but for most of his relationship with Brenda, he remains captive to his delusional belief that he would be happy if he had Brenda’s life. Only at the end does he see that marrying her would have been wrong for him. In this way, Roth suggests that a lack of self-awareness enables people to pursue unrealistic fantasies, which is unsatisfying and unproductive. It’s only through brutally honest self-examination that a person can face reality and build a life that suits them.
Early on, Roth establishes how Neil fantasizes about Brenda and her family’s life. Neil compares Brenda to an angel, as he admits that he thinks of her as having small “fluttering” wings underneath her shoulder blades. He also thinks of Brenda’s town of Short Hills as a kind of gateway to heaven: he describes when he is driving to Short Hills from his home in Newark that “It was, in fact, as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven.” In this way, Roth illustrates how Brenda and her life in the suburbs are literally and figuratively elevated above Neil’s own, establishing how Neil puts Brenda and her life on a pedestal.
Neil maintains his fantasy of Brenda’s life through his lack of self-awareness—his refusal to acknowledge that he likes her for her beauty and wealth alone. Roth makes the connection between lack of self-evaluation and the ability to buy into a fantasy explicit when Neil drives up into the mountains alone and watches some deer. He wonders about his relationship, thinking, “Only Brenda shone. Money and comfort would not erase her singleness—they hadn’t yet, or had they? What was I loving, I wondered, and since I am not one to stick scalpels into myself, I wiggled my hand in the fence and allowed a tiny-nosed buck to lick my thoughts away.” In this moment, Neil begins to understand that he loves Brenda perhaps only because of the money and comfort that she could provide, but he immediately pushes away this thought, refusing to follow it to its logical conclusion: that they should break up. With this, Roth shows how self-delusion and a resistance to self-examination perpetuate one’s fantasies.
This notion that lack of self-reflection fuels fantasy is also apparent at Neil’s library job. For a time, a young Black boy comes to the library every day to stare at a book of paintings by the artist Paul Gauguin. The boy is obsessed with looking at the Tahitian women in the paintings, dreaming about a peaceful life on a Pacific island. Neil connects the boy’s dreams with his own experience: when he visits Short Hills, Neil describes the town as having become “rose-colored, like a Gauguin stream.” He, too, fantasizes about his own version of Gauguin’s paintings. It is only at the end of the book that Neil understands the folly of such fantasy. When the boy stops coming to the library, Neil thinks that this might be for the best, positing, “No sense carrying dreams of Tahiti in your head if you can't afford the fare.” Neil understands the value of self-reflection and the value of facing reality, even if he doesn’t fully do so himself yet.
Towards the end of the novella, however, Neil starts to recognize his fantasies about Brenda for what they are: simple idealizations rather than true love. The more he reflects on himself and what he wants out of life and his relationship, the more he realizes how much he has been living in a fantasy and that he must return to reality. At the end of the summer, when Neil and Brenda attend her brother Ron’s wedding together, he watches her sleeping at the end of the night and thinks that he felt he knows “no more of her than what [he] could see in a photograph.” While he believes he loves Brenda, he starts to recognize that he has only fallen in love with an image or an idea of her, rather than an actual person. Only at the very end of the novella, once Neil and Brenda break up, is Neil able to reflect on himself and genuinely evaluate their relationship. This is made literal when he approaches a library window and stares at his reflection in the glass. While he does this, he acknowledges that he loved Brenda, but he also wonders honestly what it was about her that made him love her. He thinks, “If she had only been slightly not Brenda…but then would I have loved her?” If she had been a little different, in other words, he might have been able to idealize her less—but then, he acknowledges, he may not have loved her at all. Thus, only through reflection can Neil move beyond fantasies and evaluate what he might truly want from life.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Self-Delusion and Fantasy vs. Self-Examination and Reality ThemeTracker
Self-Delusion and Fantasy vs. Self-Examination and Reality Quotes in Goodbye, Columbus
It was, in fact, as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven, for the sun itself became bigger, lower, and rounder, and soon I was driving past long lawns which seemed to be twirling water on themselves, and past houses where no one sat on stoops, where lights were on but no windows open, for those inside, refusing to share the very texture of life with those of us outside, regulated with a dial the amounts of moisture that were allowed access to their skin.
I felt the wet spots on her shoulder blades, and beneath them, I’m sure of it, a faint fluttering, as though something stirred so deep in her breasts, so far back it could make itself felt through her shirt. It was like the fluttering of wings, tiny wings no bigger than her breasts. The smallness of the wings did not bother me—it would not take an eagle to carry me up those lousy hundred and eighty feet that make summer nights so much cooler in Short Hills than they are in Newark.
The next day I held Brenda’s glasses for her once again, this time not as momentary servant but as afternoon guest; or perhaps as both, which still was an improvement. She wore a black tank suit and went barefooted and among the other women, with their Cuban heels and boned-up breasts, their knuckle-sized rings, their straw hats, which resembled immense wicker pizza plates and had been purchased, as I heard one deeply tanned woman rasp, “from the cutest little shvartze when we docked at Barbados.” Brenda among them was elegantly simple, like a sailor’s dream of a Polynesian maiden, albeit one with prescription sun glasses and the last name of Patimkin.
“Look, look, look here at this one. Ain’t that the fuckin life?”
I agreed it was and left.
Later I sent Jimmy Boylen hopping down the stairs to tell McKee that everything was all right. The rest of the day was uneventful.
I sat at the Information Desk thinking about Brenda and reminding myself that that evening, I would have to get gas before I started up to Short Hills, which I could see now, in my mind’s eye, at dusk, rose-colored, like a Gauguin stream.
Up on the beach there were beautiful bare-skinned Negresses, and none of them moved; but suddenly we were moving our ship, out of the harbor, and the Negresses moved slowly down to the shore and began to throw leis at us and say “Goodbye, Columbus…goodbye, Columbus…goodbye…” and though we did not want to go, the little boy and I, the boat was moving and there was nothing we could do about it, and he shouted at me that it was my fault and I shouted it was his for not having a library card, but we were wasting our breath, for we here further and further from the island and soon the natives were nothing at all.
Only Brenda shone. Money and comfort would not erase her singleness—they hadn’t yet, or had they? What was I loving, I wondered, and since I am not one to stick scalpels into myself, I wiggled my hand in the fence and allowed a tiny-nosed buck to lick my thoughts away.
God, I said, I am twenty-three years old. I want to make the best of things. Now the doctor is about to wed Brenda to me, and I am not entirely certain this is all for the best. What is it I love, Lord? Why have I chosen? Who is Brenda? The race is to the swift. Should I have stopped to think?
Then he looked at me. “Whatever my Buck wants is good enough for me. There’s no business too big it can’t use another head.”
I smiled, though not directly at him, and beyond I could see Leo sopping up champagne and watching the three of us; when he caught my eye he made a sign with his hand, a circle with his thumb and forefinger, indicating, “That a boy, that a boy!”
What had probably happened was that he’d given up on the library and gone back to playing Willie Mays in the street. He was better off, I thought. No sense carrying dreams of Tahiti in your head if you can’t afford the fare.
What was it inside me that had turned pursuit and clutching into love and then turned it inside out again? What was it that had turned winning into losing, and losing—who knows—into winning? I was sure I had loved Brenda, though standing there, I knew I couldn’t any longer. And I knew it would be a long while before I made love to anyone the way I had made love to her. With anyone else, could I summon up such a passion? Whatever spurred my love for her, had that spawned such lust too? If she had only been slightly not Brenda…but then would I have loved her?
I looked hard at the image of me, at that darkening of the glass, and then my gaze pushed through it, over the cool floor, to a broken wall of books, imperfectly shelved.
I did not look very much longer, but took a train that got me into Newark just as the sun was rising on the first day of the Jewish New Year. I was back in plenty of time for work.
