📚 ALA 2025 Presentation

In May 2025, I presented on Roth's ghosts at the American Literature Association. Below are thee opening paragraphs: 

     “First you make a farce of suicide, now again you make a farce of life” the ghost of Sabbath’s mother tells him about halfway through Sabbath’s Theater. “I don’t know any other way to do it, Mother. Leave me be. Shut up. You don’t exist. There are no ghosts.” His mother, hanging over him as she does throughout the rest of the novel, replies: “Wrong. There are only ghosts.” 

     Sabbath calls himself a puppeteer. That’s what he does, after all. He puppeteers. But he is also the puppet, and one thing that surprised me while rereading Sabbath’s Theater to work on a different article is just how much of a puppeteer his mother is, despite being long dead. Sabbath so often reels back in his mind, looking for an explanation for his behavior, and his mother is almost always dangling in front of him, a spectral image of what made him the way he is. This is a theme that Roth of course plays with in much of his work, but in Sabbath’s Theater it is physicalized by his mother being a ghost. In this presentation I want to point to a couple of smaller moments in which Sabbath thinks about his mother—sometimes while having sex, sometimes while arguing with his mistress—and sort of puzzle out whether this ghost is truly the one running the show, whether this is really specter’s theater, or if his mother is just another in a long line of Sabbath’s ghosts.