In Chapter IX of Henry Roth's Call it Sleep, David arrives at a rudimentary understanding of the intrinsic connection between sexuality and death. He is confronted with the reality of death for the first time in his short life when he sees a row of funeral hearses in the street. This experience causes David great anxiety, which his mother is unable to ease; but when he looks out the kitchen window, the snowflakes trigger a sudden realization in him: "It was snow... Confetti... They threw it at these two who were getting married... Confetti . Carriages. Same! He saw it all clearly. David intuitively perceives a link between death and marriage, which unconsciously symbolizes sexuality. Say No to Plagiarism Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay David does not understand the intellectual implications of his awareness, but through the boy's limited intuition. , Roth directs the adult reader to Freud's theory of the sex drive (Eros) and the death drive (Thanatos). Sigmund Freud states that these drives originate in the human subject's need to "restore a previous state of affairs." » (Beyond the pleasure principle, 57). Freud calls this prior state "oceanic unity" and defines it as "an indissoluble bond of being one with the external world as a whole...in which...the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt" (Civilization and its Discontents, 12 -13). Thus, Freud asserts that Thanatos and Eros are two sides of the same human desire to erase the ego in order to return to a womb-like state, in which the subject is no longer alienated and separated from the world. This Freudian conceptualization of the interdependence of sexuality and death is a major theme of Call it Sleep, and I will now trace its development in the chapters following Chapter IX. The theme is invoked again two chapters later, when David is convinced that he has accidentally killed a boy by throwing him to the ground head first, and yet he does not run home because he believes that his mother is there committing adultery with Luter. At this point, David is still unable to confront the manifestations of death and sexuality, and so he flees the supposedly dead boy and the ostensibly fornicating mother, losing himself in the streets of New York. Since David only seeks escape, the Thanatos and Eros in this scene do not lead him to a feeling of oceanic unity, but on the contrary, they instill in him a feeling of isolation: "his voice died away in an anguished abandonment” (97). The theme is further developed when David helps Leo seduce Esther. This scene marks a change in David's approach to sexuality: he has deep reservations about the sexual relations between Leo and Esther, but he nevertheless becomes the catalyst for their sexual activities, and so it is clear that sexuality is not for him. is not as terrifying as it was. used to be. The Thanatos aspect of the scene is more veiled, but it appears in the background, especially in the setting of the storage bin in the cellar, which resembles a coffin in a tomb, and in David's frantic search for "the round light” (354), which is described in hyperbolic language that creates the transitory illusion that David is dying: “he sought the depths, strangling him. Then the darkness, swirling and wild... engulfed him in a fight... and he plunged into an unfathomable pit. a trail of flames and howling nothingness. (354). This third meeting with Eros and Thanatos takes place, 1991.