Self-Delusion and Fantasy vs. Self-Examination and Reality Theme Analysis

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.