Mr. Wishnow's suicide

Mr. Wishnow’s suicide brings death abruptly into the Roth family’s immediate surroundings: he is found by his son in the apartment downstairs, while Philip Roth watches the police and ambulance gather outside his own home. The scene’s shock is intensified by Philip’s confusion, which briefly makes him believe that his father, Herman Roth, is the dead man. The episode joins a concrete neighborhood tragedy to Philip’s private fears and unstable perceptions.

Discovery and Circumstances

Mr. Wishnow, who weighed barely eighty pounds, killed himself in the family’s back-foyer coat closet. He had looped the living-room curtain cords over the closet’s wooden rod and around his neck, then fallen forward from the kitchen chair where he had seated himself. He was wearing pajamas when Seldon Wishnow came home from school, went to put away his coat, and found his father facedown on the closet floor among the family’s rubbers and galoshes.

The death becomes visible first through its aftermath outside the Roths’ house. Three police cars stood in the street, an ambulance blocked the alleyway, and officers were posted at both the front stoop and back door. Women from the block watched from their stoops, while children gathered across the street, peering between parked cars. Philip had never seen the children so silent or apprehensive. He hid beside the cars with them, piecing together what had happened from their whispers and learning that Seldon and his mother were inside with a policeman and the medics.

Philip’s Misrecognition and Response

Philip initially thinks of Mr. Wishnow’s death as a release from familiar fear: he will no longer have to hear the sick man coughing while he is alone in the cellar or trying to fall asleep upstairs. That relief quickly turns into another fear. Philip imagines Mr. Wishnow’s ghost joining the other ghosts inhabiting the cellar and haunting him because he is relieved by the death.

The confusion deepens when Philip sees his mother, Bess Roth, emerge from the house alongside the medics. Unable to understand why she has come home from work, he suddenly concludes that the dead man being carried away must be Herman. In that mistaken account, he attributes his father’s supposed suicide to the political persecution of Jews and the harm Charles A. Lindbergh’s government has allowed the Nazis to inflict, as well as to what that government has done to the Roth family. The scene then corrects his perception: the person who died was Mr. Wishnow, not Herman. Philip’s fear and disorientation momentarily remake the neighbor’s death as the destruction of his own family.

Rather than go inside or risk encountering the body as it is carried down the stairs, Philip remains with the children. He is also reluctant to return home and wait alone for a family member, and he wants to avoid being questioned about Alvin Roth. The neighborhood’s spectatorship and his own retreat keep him at the threshold of the event: close enough to hear its facts, but unwilling to face the body or the questions it raises.

Aftermath and Narrative Function

Philip’s account gives the suicide two distinct afterlives: the practical shock of a child finding his father’s body, and the imagined haunting that Philip adds to the death. His momentary belief that Herman has died does not change the event’s facts; it shows how readily his existing dread supplies a more catastrophic explanation. The nearby ghosts in the cellar turn grief and relief into a lasting personal fear.

The narration also uses Friday’s suicide as a point of reference in the household’s unsettled weekend. By Sunday, Alvin has not been seen since the Friday death and his departure from a gambling game; after Uncle Monty confronts him, he accepts a job at the produce market, gives up the partnership and street gambling, and asks the family’s forgiveness. This later episode is not presented as a result of Mr. Wishnow’s death, but its placement keeps the suicide within a sequence of crises affecting the Roth household and its neighbors.