In the following essay, Adams analyzes the importance of sound as a signifier of power in Roth's Call It Sleep.

In the following essay, Wirth-Neshner discusses Roth's use of language in Call It Sleep and how the author uses multilingualism to portray David Schearl's experience as an immigrant in America.

In the following interview, Roth discusses the mystical element in Call It Sleep, and describes his relationship to Israel.

In the following essay, Altenbernd asserts that David in Roth's Call It Sleep is a messiah figure.

In the following essay, Pinsker provides reasons that the themes contained in Roth's Call It Sleep were appropriate for rediscovery in the 1960s.

In the following essay, Knowles traces the history of critical discourse about Roth's Call It Sleep and briefly analyzes Roth few short pieces of fiction written since the novel.

In the following essay, Ledbetter discusses the relationship between Roth's Call It Sleep and other proletarian novels of the 1930s. He asserts that "Roth's achievement is a novel first, and a proletarian one only secondarily."

In the following review, Alter discusses Roth's Call It Sleep and asserts that his new volume, Shifting Landscape "provides the outlines of a spiritual autobiography."

In the following essay, Ribalow asserts the importance of Roth's Call It Sleep in a discussion of how it expresses the Jewish immigrant experience in America and how it portrays the pains of adolescence.

In the following essay, Fein discusses David Schearl's enmity with his father in Roth's Call It Sleep.

In the following essay. Walden discusses David's quest for peace and a sign from God in Roth's Call It Sleep.

In the following essay, Howe asserts that "At the end of a novel like Call It Sleep, one has lived through a completeness of rendered life, and all one need do is silently to acknowledge its truth."

[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, sa...

In the following review, Alter compares Roth's two novels, Call It Sleep and Mercy of a Rude Stream, complaining that the latter does not have the emotional depth or novelistic tension of the first.

In the following review, Marsh praises Roth's Call It Sleep and asserts that the novel should win the Pulitzer Prize.

Call It Sleep is the kind of book one feels a bit reluctant to write about, at least to "criticize," in the icy sense of that term. To criticize, to analyze, is in a sense to freeze, and Henry Roth's great and only novel becomes too much a part of one's immediate and intimate experience for that. It is, of course, the very personal quality of the book that assured its consignment to obscurity during the golden age of the proletarian novel. Though Call It Sleep may be such a work ...

In the following review, Gollomb complains that in Call It Sleep, Roth magnifies the foulness of life on the east side of New York instead of accurately portraying it.

The 'thirties, in America even more than in England, was the period of socially conscious fiction and of much theorizing about what was called the proletarian novel. Inevitably, Call It Sleep was seen as an attempt at a proletarian novel; or it was judged that it would have been a better book if it had been a proletarian novel…. (p. 443) Call It Sleep must be the most powerful evocation of the terrors of childhood ever written. Lost, bewildered, friendless, the small boy David scuttles through...