[There has] been nearly unanimous agreement among critics that the … closing episodes [of Call It Sleep] witness a radical transfiguration of David Schearl. Whether the terms of the [protagonist's] conflict are defined as political, psychological, or religious, all of Roth's interpreters argue that Call It Sleep traces a movement from terror and alienation to tranquility and reconciliation. (p. 569)
The terms recur again and again [in the interpretations]: redemption, reconciliation, salvation, vision, transcendence…. [I would like to suggest that] David's moments of illumination are essentially bogus—images of betrayal rather than of salvation. And the tranquility which he wins from terror is something far more marginal, tentative, and equivocal than has generally been recognized. Dazzled by Roth's verbal fireworks, much as David is dazed by the light from the car tracks, most critics have failed to understand David's actual domestic predicament and the defined dramatic action of the novel's ending. It is, after all, "only toward sleep" that David can extract coherence from the chaotic nightmare of his waking world; it is only in the numbed withdrawal, the fuzzy half-consciousness of sleep that terror is held at bay. The question nags; if the critics call it redemption, why does Roth call it sleep?
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