Eli on the verge of a nervous breakdown - Roth's early stories

Philip Roth's Eli, the Fanatic, the last story in his debut collection, Goodbye, Columbus, is a really good story on a # of levels - the subtle way in which he conveys the gradual breakdown of Eli's mind (at the end, he's basically in a straight-jacket, but we're so engaged with his personality and his dilemma that, despite the complete oddity of his behavior, dressing up as a Hasidic Jew and roaming the neighborhood, as his wife is in labor with their first child, that we almost don't see his craziness - we wonder why the neighbors are staring), and the Conrad-like "Secret Sharer" elements, as Eli trades clothing with the old Hasid and they in a sense become each other's double. There's also a strong social critique in the story, the assimilated Jews of this prosperous suburb ashamed by the presence of old-world Jews and Yeshiva boys in their community - why can't they dress like us? - and so they rally around the cause of removing the Yeshiva from their midst - a clear and disturbing echo of the Holocaust. Like other stories on Goodbye, Columbus, this one has a finely wrought ending - Eli, dressed as a Hasid, making a scene in the hospital, getting a sedative needle pushed into a vein - and it's another one of Roth's early pieces that seem cinematic - which strikes me as odd in that many of the great novels from much later in Roth's career are not especially strong on plot - some, such as American Pastoral, end abruptly with, deliberately I believe, no clear sense of an ending. Roth continued to push at the edges of convention throughout all of his writing - though he began as a very conventional writer but with a literary milieu - the Jews of Newark (or of any mid-sized Eastern city for that matter) all to himself.