"How You Cling to Your Grievance!": The Problem of Realism in Sabbath's Theater.

The title character of Sabbath's Theater (1995) is a noted iconoclast. Most treatments of Sabbath's character attempt to reconcile his social deviance with his traumatic past--the death of his brother in war, his lover to cancer, and his first wife in absentia. Implied in these readings is a surprising truth about Sabbath: he is, despite himself, a traditionalist. This essay argues that Sabbath (like Roth) is committed to the conventions of literary realism, but this commitment is tested throughout the novel; realist techniques continually fail to address Sabbath's grief, revealing their aesthetic and affective limits. Sabbath's Theater is thus a sustained critique of the very form in which it is written--an airing of grievances with literary realism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]