Major spoilers for the plot of Sabbath's Theater follow.
Mickey Sabbath, the protagonist of Roth's novel Sabbath's Theater, is a vile human being who seems totally unable to resist his basest instincts. Through the course of the book, he commits a number of perverted sexual acts and comes across as a wholly self-centered and self-obsessed character, although he does not particularly seem like a violent man.
Early in the book, we learn that Sabbath's first wife, Nikki, went missing. Later, in Roth's characteristic heavy use of flashbacks, we hear about the period immediately after her disappearance when Sabbath seems distressed and distracted. Sabbath's friends are with him at this time, and they comfort him.
However, later in the book, Sabbath "confesses" to a girlfriend that he killed Nikki, going into some detail about how he committed the act. She doesn't really believe him, but seems frightened by his behaviour. If I remember rightly, he also makes this confession in passing to one of his friends, who ignores it. Toward the end of the novel he imagines what he'd like on his tombstone, which includes the word "uxoricide", a term unfamiliar to me but which means a wife-killer.
Sabbath leads a rich inner life and at several other points in the book he questions himself whether his emotions are genuine or performative. And he seems to take pleasure in confusing others and presenting himself as a morally bad person. So it's entirely reasonable to think that these confessions are made up. But I was struck by the repetition, and by his total selfishness. To me, it seems equally reasonable to think that he did, in fact, kill Nikki and that this is an ambiguous question in the novel.
Critics, however, seem unanimous in stating that these confessions are a fantasy:
His first wife, Nikki, the star of his Lower East Side theater troupe, vanishes (every once in a while thereafter he will tell people–casually, equably, falsely–that he killed her)
Chicago Tribune
his first wife, whose disappearance haunts him
The Yale Review
his first wife, Nikki, who mysteriously disappears one day in 1964
University of Reading
Have I missed something in the book which makes it definitive that Sabbath did not kill Nikki and that his confessions are manipulative fantasies? And if not, why does opinion seem fairly united that he did not?
