In Chapter IX of Henry Roth's Call it Sleep, David achieves 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 line of hearses on the street. This experience causes David great anxiety, which his mother is unable to alleviate; but when he looks through the kitchen window, the snowflakes trigger a sudden awareness in him: "There was snow... Confetti... They threw it on those two who were about to get married... Confetti. Carriages. Carriages!... It all belonged to the same dark one." (70). David intuitively perceives a link between death and marriage, which for him unconsciously symbolizes sexuality. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay David does not understand the intellectual implications of his realization, but through the boy's limited intuition Roth directs the adult reader towards Freud's theory of the sex drive (Eros) and death drive (Thanatos). Sigmund Freud argues that these drives originate in the human subject's need to "restore a previous state of things" (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 57). Freud calls this previous 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 dissolve" (Civilization and its Discontents, 12). -13). Thus, Freud states that Thanatos and Eros are two faces of the same human desire to erase the ego 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 interconnection between sexuality and death is one of the main themes of Call it Sleep, and I will henceforth 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 knocking his head to the ground, yet he does not run home because he believes his mother is there committing adultery with Luther. At this stage, David is still unable to deal with the manifestations of death and sexuality, and so he runs away from the supposedly dead boy and his apparently fornicating mother, getting lost on the streets of New York City. Since David seeks only escape from them, Thanatos and Eros in this scene do not lead him to a feeling of oceanic unity, but on the contrary, instill in him a sense of isolation: "his voice died in anguished abandonment" ( 97). The theme is further developed when Davide helps Leone seduce Ester. This scene marks a change in David's approach to sexuality: he has deep doubts 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 for him is not as terrifying as it would be . once upon a time it was. The Thanatos aspect of the scene is more veiled, but appears in the background, especially in the setting of the container in the cellar, which resembles a coffin in a tomb, and in David's frantic search for the "round light" (354), described with a 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 brawl... and he plunged into an unfathomable well. A streak of flames and a screaming nothingness. (354). This third encounter with Eros and Thanatos once again ends with David's escape through the streets of New York. Yet, unlike the previous encounters, following this encounter David progresses a feeling of, 1991.