Abstract

Set against the backdrop of the lower class in America, the novel Sabbath’s Theater, which can be interpreted as a “memory’s museum of earthly blight” (Roth, 1996, p. 353), unveils a panorama of how an innocent and ingenuous boy degenerates into a dissolute and lascivious puppeteer. Mickey Sabbath, the protagonist of the novel, is described as a decadent libertine whose lustful cupidity does not subdue in the wake of his ongoing senility. Working as a puppeteer, Sabbath shrewdly turns his fingers into a pragmatic tool of subsistence and more sardonically, a licentious hook of sexuality. He epitomizes every desperate and listless loser who languishes in a dilemma between life and death. However, the law of nature has no mercy for the defeated. Like “one of billions who has grown old, ugly and embittered” (Roth, 1996, p. 143), Sabbath, at the age of sixty four, is confronted with a battery of crises—he becomes “wifeless, mistressless, penniless, vocationless and homeless” (Roth, 1996, p. 142). Enveloped in desperation and fatalism, Sabbath sets foot upon a journey toward the ultimate destination of death, during which he recalls his “motherless” childhood, his disillusioned adolescence, his youthful debauchery in whorehouses, and his irrevocable self-abandonment to puppets and women. Philip Roth compares puppetry into a “faultlessly rendered duet” (Roth, 1996, p. 438), shedding light on the cohesive juxtaposition of two divergent identities in a puppet show. This research focuses on why and how Mickey Sabbath’s outrageous abuse of identity transplantation becomes a scourge of his perversion. The concept of “puppetness” is introduced in this paper to account for the quasi-human attributes of puppets and the trinity relationship among puppets, puppeteers, and audiences. The distinctive power of puppets in emotional appeal makes them a soul-stirring agent that can mediate through performers and audiences. Psychoanalysis is expected to be an optimal theory to approach to “puppetness” in this empathetic scenario. 

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