53 pages • 1 hour read
Hubert Selby Jr.Requiem for a Dream: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Tyrone learns from Brody that the two men who had been distributing the strong heroin had stolen it from the Jefferson Brothers. The Jefferson Brothers killed them, and now the heroin Tyrone buys from Brody is hardly enough to just get Harry and Tyrone high, let alone to sell for a major profit. Sara, meanwhile, falls deeper into amphetamine addiction. She continues to lose weight, but she is no longer happy, afflicted by a deep paranoia. Brody’s supply of dynamite heroin runs out. Harry, Tyrone, Marion, and Alice can barely sustain their own habits. They make excuses to themselves about being able to quit whenever they want.
Sara begins taking all of the day’s diet pills in the morning, trying to ignore the onset of withdrawals. She begins to hallucinate, imagining herself on the quiz show in her red dress, then seeing herself walk out of the screen and disappear into her apartment. Eventually, her own apartment is broadcast, and she is afflicted by a horrible sense of shame and paranoia at the shabbiness of it.
Chapter 5 Summary
Brody gets murdered. With no drug hookup, Harry and Tyrone are in trouble. Sara has to go to the store, fighting through intense paranoia and hallucinations. She has a breakdown, clinging to a traffic light until her friends Ada and Rae find her. They take her to her doctor, who ignores Sara’s concerns and the context of her behaviors and prescribes her Valium, which helps calm her down.
While carefully searching the streets for another hookup, Tyrone gets arrested. While in the cop car, he shoves the heroin he had in his possession into the seat. In the jail cell, an old man with a drug addiction is booked. He hides the track marks on his neck with a tie and stores residual bits of heroin in the padded shoulders of his salvation army jacket to cook up before he is taken to Rikers. The old man becomes the center of attention, telling stories of his previous incarcerations, and advising the other men to be wary of women. Tyrone listens, enthralled for a while, but quickly tries to differentiate himself from the old man, who he sees as rat-like. Harry bails him out. On the way back to Tyrone’s apartment, Tyrone is filled with the warmth of his friendship with Harry, though he cannot shake the image of the old man. Once home, he hugs and kisses Alice, then uses some heroin to move on from his experience in jail and relax.
On the way home, Harry cannot get the image of the “old dope fiend” out of his mind. At home, he tells Marion about him and what Tyrone went through. Marion explains the old man’s behavior in a Freudian way, ignoring the implications of a lifetime of addition, but making Harry feel better. She goes on to rail against the police and the middle class, like her parents. They shoot up before Harry must go back to work.
Chapter 6 Summary
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur pass, and Sara has still heard nothing from Lyle McDick. Meanwhile, the heroin supply on the streets continues to dwindle. Harry and Marion start to give up on their dreams of the future, focusing more and more on their deepening addiction. When they run out of heroin and start to suffer from withdrawals, they resort to extracting heroin from used cotton balls they saved over time when they would shoot up. They remain in denial about their addiction, but they are forced to recognize it when Tyrone finally scores, and they can shoot up once again.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Summer fades into fall, and the cold weather begins to creep into the city. With the change of the seasons comes an onset of hard times for all four protagonists. While Harry, Tyrone, and Marion deal with a growing shortage of heroin, Sara faces problems related to a corrupt healthcare industry. Sara’s condition begins to worsen, as her dependency on her diet pills begins to take a toll on her health. The pills are a type of amphetamine, a close chemical analog to methamphetamine, and come with many of the same side effects, including teeth grinding, paranoia, and sleep deprivation, which can induce psychotic episodes. Throughout Chapters 4 and 5, Sara hallucinates frequently. These delusions involve the material fixations of her small world. Her thoughts become disoriented, and she has to fight for focus. She routinely imagines herself on a game show, and as her condition worsens, she sees herself leave the screen and disappear somewhere in the apartment:
[T]he announcer left the set too, and little red riding hood led him around the apartment showing him this and that, the both of them shaking their heads with overwhelming disapproval, then looking up at Sara, shaking their heads again, then back at the spot of inspection, back to Sara, another shake of the head and off to another area to continue the inspection and the disapproving glances and shakes (124).
Her paranoia reflects her sense of shame for the shabbiness of her life failing to live up to the fabulous dream of fame she has constructed while waiting for a response from the McDick Corp. She previously personified her refrigerator and its contents as a sort of “opponent” during her brief period of dieting; it now looms monstrous and threatening, chasing her out of her apartment and into the street, where her friends Ada and Rae find her clinging to a traffic light. This psychological crisis culminates in her doctor prescribing her valium, which masks the problem rather than treats it, causing her condition to worsen overall.
Chapter 4 opens with, “The honeymoon was over. The dynamite was gone” (121). The inherent danger in the drug business comes close to home for the first time for Harry and Tyrone, when the distributors of the strong heroin they had been cutting and selling turn up dead for crossing the Jefferson Brothers. They had essentially operated in an artificially inflated market; because the distributors who sold to Brody, who sold to Tyrone, were trying to offload the stolen heroin as quickly as possible, Tyrone was able to buy it cheaply from Brody. This new heroin is half the strength: where they could cut the “dynamite” with milk sugar to a fourth of the potency, they can only cut this batch by half without running the risk of ripping off their customers and ruining their reputation as dealers or putting themselves in danger (121). Even worse, Harry, Tyrone, and Marion are used to dipping into their own supply. The dynamite heroin has upped their tolerance to such a degree that they need nearly double the dose to get high. This proves dangerous as they unwittingly slide deeper into the dependency and addiction depicted in Chapter 3. By Chapter 4, Harry, Tyrone, Marion, and Alice have been using heroin all summer; they are dependent on the drug. Up until this point, they have had largely functional addictions. However, the refrain that they can quit whenever they want becomes more and more unbelievable and desperate each time it is repeated. Their growing desperation betrays their deepening addiction.
When Harry bails Tyrone out of jail, Tyrone is filled with the warmth of their friendship. He knows Harry has his back, and it helps him feel secure during an increasingly uncertain time. However, the specter of the “old dope fiend” in the holding cell haunts him. The old man has gone to prison so many times he is completely suited to the environment and even prepares for his next incarceration by stashing bits of heroin in the padding of his ratty suit jacket so he can get high in the cell. The old man represents the ravages of a lifetime of addiction, causing Tyrone to swear, “Ah aint gonna marry no habit. No mutha fuckin death do us part with me an no jones” (135). When Harry tells Marion about the old man, she manages to settle his disquiet in her typical way: deflecting the topic by offering a trite, Freudian explanation of the old man and instead connecting police brutality with the ignorance of the middle classes. She concludes, “It just amazes me how blind some people can be to the truth. Its right there in front of them and they dont see it,” before asking Harry if they can shoot up (137). They unfortunately miss the profound irony in this brief conversation: The truth of their own addiction is right in front of their eyes, and they are willfully ignorant of it. While the old man represents a specific potential future that they wish to avoid, his presence foreshadows the equally degrading outcomes that Harry, Tyrone, and Marion will face in the final chapters of the novel.
