Dream-Texts Integrating and Disintegrating: Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, Carl Jung’s “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy,” and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight

Abstract

This chapter analyzes cases in which dream-texts act as a force for narrative and thematic integration, specifically Neil Klugman’s “Island Dream” from Philip Roth’s novella Goodbye, Columbus and the sequence of dream reports from Carl Jung’s “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy.” With Roth, the chapter shows how the integrative functions of the dream-text are deployed in literary narratives. Jung’s piece on dreams and alchemy represents one of the most sophisticated uses of the dream-text in the quest for wholeness in the modernist era. This chapter contrasts these integrative approaches with Jean Rhys’s novel Good Morning, Midnight. Good Morning, Midnight challenges authoritarian models of modernist integrative dream interpretation and asserts the emancipatory possibilities of disintegration.