The Refusal to Mourn: Loss, Grievance, and Damaged Selfhood in Saul Bellow’s Herzog and Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater

Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) and Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater (1995) stand three decades apart, yet each anatomizes a male protagonist whose world of attachments has disintegrated. This article sets the two novels against one another as antithetical resolutions of that shared predicament. Bellow’s Moses Herzog works his self-division into the unsent letter and at last lays grievance down; Roth’s Mickey Sabbath turns grief into transgression and, at his mistress’s graveside, spurns both suicide and consolation. Drawing on Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, Trilling’s moral realism, and recent Roth and Bellow scholarship, the article maps the inventories of loss in the two novels, the formal architecture of self-division through which loss is processed, and the divergent ethics of mourning that their endings install. Herzog refines an inheritance of moral seriousness in which the discursive ego still recovers; Sabbath’s Theater breaks with that inheritance and offers, in its place, a position grounded in the body, the obscene, and the unmourned dead. The article closes by acknowledging the limits of the binary and registering each novel’s internal contradictions.