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.
Symbols & Motifs
Sara’s Red Dress
Content Warning: This guide discusses explicit usage of illegal drugs, depictions of drug addiction, depictions of mental illness, depictions of violence (sexual, domestic, racial, and graphic), as well as stereotypes of racial and ethnic minorities. This guide references language from the text concerning race and addiction which may be considered offensive. This study guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word.
Sara’s obsession with being on television intersects with her obsession over her red dress, which, for Sara, symbolizes better times, when her family was intact. By this same metric, Sara’s struggle to fit into the dress also symbolizes Sara’s depression, as well as her obsession with aging and weight loss. She reflects on her past when she first puts the dress on after learning from Lyle Russell that she will be on television:
[S]he looked through eyes of many yesterdays at herself in the gorgeous red dress and gold shoes she wore when her Harry was bar mitzvahed...Seymour was still alive then...and not even sick...and her boobala looked so nice in his—Ah, thats gone. No more. Seymour’s dead and her—Ah, I/ll show Ada how it looks (31).
In addition to demonstrating Selby Jr.’s use of deep perspective and close narrative distance, this passage highlights the way that Sara interacts with herself through monologues that always bend toward the past because, until the invitation by the McDick Corp., she does not believe she has a future. The red dress allows her to reclaim some of her past happiness, when her husband was still alive, and when Harry was young, and she did not have to fabricate lies to herself to maintain a false perception of Harry’s innocence.
As the novel progresses, the red dress is the metric by which Sara measures her weight loss progression and her steps toward her personal American Dream—how “zophtic” she feels depends on how the red dress fits. However, as she descends into amphetamine addiction, the dress, which she once struggled to zip up, now hangs off her bony frame. Her obsession with being on television becomes a generalized mania; she wears the red dress all the time, suffering hallucinations of herself wearing it on TV (and coming out of the television screen to haunt herself in her apartment). By the time she is committed to a mental health hospital, the dress is stained and tattered, demonstrating the way this symbol intersects with the novel’s themes of addiction and the failure of dreams.
The Old Dope Fiend
When Tyrone is arrested and taken to jail, he shares the holding cell with a variety of prisoners, including “an old time dope fiend, who looked like he was a hundred and four” (130). The old man “made himself at home as if he had been born and raised in jail” and “had needle tracks on the side of his neck where he had been shooting heroin into his vein” (130). The figure of the old man haunts Tyrone and Harry throughout the rest of the novel. He is a symbol of the depths one can fall to when suffering a lifelong addiction. He represents a rock bottom to which they are terrified of falling, but which seems inevitable, based on the trajectory of their addiction.
During his brief appearance in the novel, the old man becomes the center of attention in the holding cell, regaling the younger men with degenerate stories with which Tyrone finds difficult not to resonate. Listening to the old man, Tyrone gradually feels like “[t]here seemed to be something between him and the rest of the dudes in that cell…a sense of identification, like they had something in common” (136) However, recognizing something of himself in the old man shocks Tyrone into a rare moment of self-reflection. Up until this point in the novel, the protagonists refuse to acknowledge their dependency on heroin. They are aware of the dangers of becoming “strung out” (completely addicted to and dependent on the drug, to the extent that they would do anything to get their fix), but they still see themselves as in control. Unfortunately, the specter of the aged man is not enough to prevent their downfalls. Instead of a warning deterring them from their addiction, the “old dope fiend” is a foreshadowing of what is to come and the inescapability of The Effects of Drug Addiction.
Harry and Marion’s Café
When Harry and Marion become a couple, they begin to dream of opening a hip, bohemian café in the style of the cafes Marion experienced during her time in Europe. Harry always secretly wanted to open a café, and Marion wants a space for local artists to congregate. Together, their vision forms a beautiful dream that they aspire to achieve. The café is a symbol of their dreams for the future, as well as the potential that Harry and Marion squander as they descend into heroin addiction. As they become more dependent on Heroin, they begin to plan less and less for the future. In their planning, they did not consider their personal limitations and the context of their addictions. With rose-colored glasses, they imagine a better life and strive for it without pragmatism, falling into a deeper relationship with heroin and straying further and further from their dreams.
