Harry Goldfarb

Harry Goldfarb is a heroin user who wants a life beyond the streets but repeatedly turns to drugs, theft, and precarious schemes to pursue it. His relationships show both his capacity for tenderness and the instability of his attempts to build a future: he steals his mother’s television, imagines a new life with Marion Silver, and works with Tyrone C. Love to raise money for heroin. Even success brings only a fleeting sense of wholeness, while the bonds he values remain entangled with dependence and harm.

Identity and Background

Harry Goldfarb is Sara Goldfarb’s only child and the last of the Goldfarb line in her understanding of the family. She remembers him as her Harold, a good boy who is merely mischievous, and imagines that he will eventually settle down with a nice young Jewish woman. Her account of his childhood sits beside Harry’s own warm recollections: he remembers his mother protecting him from the winter wind, hugging the cold from his ears and cheeks, and having hot soup ready when he came home. These memories give his bond with Sara a tenderness that persists beneath their conflicts.

Harry’s circumstances also include repeated theft. When he takes Sara’s television to sell or pawn, she redeems it and pays Abe Rabinowitz, who keeps a ledger titled with her name and the set’s history. Rabinowitz recalls that Harry has taken the television three times in one month. Sara refuses his suggestion that she involve the police: she fears making her son a criminal and having him placed among people who might teach him worse. Her protection does not prevent the theft from recurring, but it helps explain why Harry can return to a home where the set, and his mother’s hope for him, are repeatedly restored.

Mother and Television

One confrontation makes the damage and intimacy of their relationship visible in the room itself. Harry finds Sara in a closet after she has locked herself inside. He starts to move the television, only to discover it chained to the radiator. Believing at first that the chain is meant to manipulate or endanger him, he protests that it could make him break the set or damage the radiator. Sara eventually explains that the chain is meant to deter robbers. Harry unlocks it, but the exchange leaves him accusing her of upsetting him even as she remains shut away. Their argument turns a household object into a record of mutual fear: the television is something Harry takes, something Sara must guard, and something she cannot bring herself to surrender.

The set also shapes Sara’s image of her son. As she watches commercials and television dramas, she thinks of Harry as too thin and imagines him healthy, married, and settled. When a program depicts a mother waiting anxiously while a doctor treats her son, Sara assumes the boy will recover and reassures herself that everything will be all right for Harry too. Her confidence belongs to the television’s promised resolutions rather than to evidence about her son’s actual life. In that contrast, Harry becomes both the object of her devotion and the person whose repeated actions undermine the happy future she projects onto him.

Harry’s attachment to Sara is not only a matter of conflict. During a visit, he arrives in new clothes and a relaxed mood, and Sara embraces him while the neighborhood women greet him warmly. As they sit together, he kisses her. For a brief moment he experiences a feeling he cannot identify except as a sense of being whole, as though the parts of him were in harmony. The feeling is short-lived. Hearing Sara grind her teeth, Harry recognizes the sound and realizes she is taking diet pills. His discovery changes the visit from affectionate reunion to alarm and confrontation: he asks whether she is using uppers, while Sara is confused by his sudden accusation. His reaction exposes a painful reversal. The son who has concealed his own drug use recognizes a stimulant habit in his mother, and the moment of familial closeness becomes a moment of shared danger.

Marion Silver and the Desire for Another Life

Harry tells Marion Silver that he feels understood by her in a way he does not by other people. She says that compliments about her beauty have never made her feel known, and Harry responds by treating her inner life as real and worthy of attention. Their physical tenderness accompanies a shared fantasy of a life with purpose. Harry says he does not want to remain a floating crap game in the streets and that, with Marion beside him, he could become something. He presents her as the person who might give his life a reason; she, in turn, believes he can unlock the creative self she longs to express. Their closeness is genuine in the scene, but its promise is also heavy: each asks the relationship to supply what neither has secured independently.

That dependence appears in a later moment of jealousy. When Marion says she is seeing her therapist for dinner and a concert, Harry objects and urges her to stop seeing him. Marion explains that she wants to keep the weekly fifty dollars her parents provide through the arrangement and reassures Harry that she will not sleep with the therapist. Harry sulks despite her explanation; Marion recognizes his jealousy and uses affection to draw him back into closeness. The scene shows their capacity for play and reconciliation, but also Harry’s difficulty tolerating a connection he cannot control. Their imagined future as partners in a café-theater remains vulnerable to the insecurity and drug economy surrounding it.

Work, Drugs, and the Future He Imagines

Harry and Tyrone C. Love take loading work at a plant and use dexedrine to stay awake through the shifts, followed by downers when they crash. They work overtime, declare twenty-five dependents to obtain the maximum checks, and count their earnings in a bar. Their immediate purpose is to buy heroin: after calling Brody, they learn that a piece of good product will cost about five hundred dollars, leaving them roughly one hundred short. Harry proposes asking Marion for the money, assuring Tyrone that they will repay her and move closer to the coffee house they have been planning. The work brings them cash, but the urgency and calculation surrounding it are organized around another drug purchase.

Their fortunes later seem to improve. Harry and Tyrone make more than a thousand dollars a day and begin fronting drugs to others, splitting the proceeds with them. In this stretch of apparent prosperity, Harry thinks of buying Sara a television. He rejects perfume as the wrong gift and decides that a large color set would suit her, partly because he feels he owes her after the wear and tear caused by repeatedly moving her old one. When Marion asks whether he loves his mother, Harry cannot give a simple answer. He says that most of the time he wants her to be happy, while admitting that he sometimes feels he might attack her. The proposed gift therefore carries two truths at once: his wish to make amends is real, but it does not erase his anger or the conduct that created the debt.

Relationships and Narrative Role

Harry’s partnership with Tyrone C. Love rests on shared drug use, work, and plans. The two encourage one another, celebrate the money they earn, and make decisions together about where to obtain heroin and how to raise the missing funds. In a conversation about mothers, Tyrone recalls the warmth and singing of his own mother, who died when he was a child. Harry answers by remembering his own mother’s protection and care. The exchange briefly shifts them from hustlers planning another night’s work to men recalling the comfort they associate with childhood. It suggests that their companionship carries more than a business purpose, even as the work they return to remains driven by heroin.

Across these relationships, Harry’s desire for a different life is repeatedly visible but never securely realized in the evidence of these scenes. He wants to become something beyond the streets, to make Marion’s life with him meaningful, and to give Sara a gift that might repair an old injury. Yet the same pattern persists: he steals from his mother, seeks money for heroin, and depends on others to lend purpose or resources to his plans. His brief feeling of wholeness while kissing Sara offers a sharp counterpoint to that pattern, but it does not last long enough to resolve it. Harry’s character is defined by the distance between the intimacy and future he can imagine and the choices through which he tries to reach them.