Roth at Rest - before he wrote novels

Defender of the Faith, the 3rd story in Philip Roth's debut collection, Goodbye, Columbus, ends with the narrator, Sgt. Nathan Marx, making a fateful decision - about someone else's fate. Over the course of the story, the 3 Jewish privates under his command continue to push him for special favors, and Marx gives way. He's a smart guy, so it's hard to believe he would fall for their bullshit and provide all 3 with a weekend pass to attend a seder - a month after passover no less - and even forge his commanding officer's signature to provide them with the pass. It's no surprise to us - and shouldn't be to Marx, either (if he's really a Columbia grad bound for law school) - that they scamming him, an heading off for who knows what. Stupidly, they bring him back an egg roll, just to rub it in his face that there never was to be a month-late seder. Marx retaliates by pulling some weight to get one of the guys reassigned from stateside to the Pacific. The war was just about over at that point, so this isn't necessarily a death sentence - but Roth is clearly making a parallel between Marx's action and the Holocaust. We don't know what becomes of the soldier sent to the Pacific, but one way or another Marx will b wracked with guilt for life: either he sent a young soldier - a conniving liar, but still a soldier - to his death, or, if they guy's alive, he's made an enemy for life. Like other stories in the collection, this one seems to call out for a sequel: do these guys ever meet again? Does Marx try to track down his victim? To my knowledge, Roth never followed up on this or on any of the stories in this collection - but we can see the range of his imagination - each of this stories has hints of becoming so much broader and grander - and it's obvious that at this time Roth was moving toward writing on a bigger "canvas." What he needed in order to do so was a more dynamic narrator - which he found, first in Letting Go and then of course in the Zuckerman and Portnoy novels, which fall in the great tradition of grand American schematic fiction, as in Updike and Faulkner - a series of novels that explore and develop a single setting, a single consciousness, or both.