Identity Transplantation: A Psychoanalysis of “Puppetness” in the Novel of Sabbath’s Theater
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Set against the backdrop of the lower class in America, the novel Sabbath’s Theater, which can be interpreted as a “memory’s museum of earthly blight” (Roth, 1996, p. 353), unveils a panorama of how an innocent and ingenuous boy degenerates into a dissolute and lascivious puppeteer. Mickey Sabbath, the protagonist of the novel, is described as a decadent libertine whose lustful cupidity does not subdue in the wake of his ongoing senility. Working as a puppeteer, Sabbath shrewdly turns his fingers into a pragmatic tool of subsistence and more sardonically, a licentious hook of sexuality. He epitomizes every desperate and listless loser who languishes in a dilemma between life and death. However, the law of nature has no mercy for the defeated. Like “one of billions who has grown old, ugly and embittered” (Roth, 1996, p. 143), Sabbath, at the age of sixty four, is confronted with a battery of crises—he becomes “wifeless, mistressless, penniless, vocationless and homeless” (Roth, 1996, p. 142). Enveloped in desperation and fatalism, Sabbath sets foot upon a journey toward the ultimate destination of death, during which he recalls his “motherless” childhood, his disillusioned adolescence, his youthful debauchery in whorehouses, and his irrevocable self-abandonment to puppets and women. Philip Roth compares puppetry into a “faultlessly rendered duet” (Roth, 1996, p. 438), shedding light on the cohesive juxtaposition of two divergent identities in a puppet show. This research focuses on why and how Mickey Sabbath’s outrageous abuse of identity transplantation becomes a scourge of his perversion. The concept of “puppetness” is introduced in this paper to account for the quasi-human attributes of puppets and the trinity relationship among puppets, puppeteers, and audiences. The distinctive power of puppets in emotional appeal makes them a soul-stirring agent that mediate through performers and audiences. Psychoanalysis is expected to be an optimal theory to approach to “puppetness” in this empathetic scenario.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".