Goodbye, Columbus Themes

What do you think of when you think of summer? Vacations? Water? Fun in the sun? Summer flings? If you want to see this all play out in an awesome novel by a renowned author, Goodbye, Columbus migh...

Goodbye, Columbus is Neil Klugman's voyage of discovery. As signaled by the glasses we see in the first line of the novella, he will undergo a changing of vision. His struggle throughout the story...

As the quotes for this theme demonstrate, reading Goodbye, Columbus is like visiting a language buffet. The novella is probably seventy-five percent dialogue, and you'll find it rich, diverse, bawd...

In Goodbye, Columbus, Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin are from two different social and economic classes. He is a middle-class city boy and she is a wealthy suburbanite. These factors severely tes...

Neil Klugman, the twenty-three-year-old narrator and protagonist of Goodbye, Columbus seems to take the moral high ground everywhere he goes. As his summer love, Brenda Patimkin, soon learns, this...

Goodbye, Columbus is set mostly in the city of Newark, New Jersey and its opulent suburb Short Hills in the late 1950s. This was a time of great change everywhere in America as rules and norms rega...

Goodbye, Columbus is told from the point of view of Neil Klugman, a twenty-three-year-old man. Yet, through a variety of techniques, the novella approaches issues of contraception and sexuality fro...

One reason Goodbye, Columbus is a summer-to-fall romance instead of a long-lasting relationship is because Neil and Brenda can't stop manipulating each other. And when they aren't manipulating each...