53 pages • 1 hour read
Hubert Selby Jr.Requiem for a Dream: A Novel
Hubert Selby Jr.Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Sara’s Red Dress
Content Warning: This guide discusses explicit usage of illegal drugs, depictions of drug addiction, depictions of mental illness, depictions of violence (sexual, domestic, racial, and graphic), as well as stereotypes of racial and ethnic minorities. This guide references language from the text concerning race and addiction which may be considered offensive. This study guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word.
Sara’s obsession with being on television intersects with her obsession over her red dress, which, for Sara, symbolizes better times, when her family was intact. By this same metric, Sara’s struggle to fit into the dress also symbolizes Sara’s depression, as well as her obsession with aging and weight loss. She reflects on her past when she first puts the dress on after learning from Lyle Russell that she will be on television:
[S]he looked through eyes of many yesterdays at herself in the gorgeous red dress and gold shoes she wore when her Harry was bar mitzvahed...Seymour was still alive then...and not even sick...and her boobala looked so nice in his—Ah, thats gone. No more. Seymour’s dead and her—Ah, I/ll show Ada how it looks (31).
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