The title functions as a trick: to tempt and enable a reader to simultaneously hear the point that is made by "Goodbye" in each of the two songs (two incompatible points), while watching Neil ambivalently and uncomfortably tip back and forth between the two of them, and to simultaneously feel those attitudes and Roth's attitudes toward them, in order to see, among other things, the incompleteness and distortedness of each of the three goodbye-sayers' view of what he is saying goodbye to. It is a magic trick, though not of the kind that stops the members of a magician's audience from glimpsing what is happening two feet away from what they have all fixed their gaze on. Quite the contrary: The trick illuminates what is murky and unconscious.
The title functions as a trick: to tempt and enable a reader to simultaneously hear the point that is made by "Goodbye" in each of the two songs (two incompatible points), while watching Neil ambivalently and uncomfortably tip back and forth between the two of them, and to simultaneously feel those attitudes and Roth's attitudes toward them, in order to see, among other things, the incompleteness and distortedness of each of the three goodbye-sayers' view of what he is saying goodbye to. It is a magic trick, though not of the kind that stops the members of a magician's audience from glimpsing what is happening two feet away from what they have all fixed their gaze on. Quite the contrary: The trick illuminates what is murky and unconscious.