Analysis
The stories share themes of disillusionment and frustration over thwarted desires. Frimme Hersh grieves over the death of his daughter, which he perceives as a breach of his contract with God; street singer Eddie returns to insignificance when he finds himself unable to find his would-be benefactor; Goldie's and Willie's romantic ideals are disillusioned after her near-rape and his seduction. Violence also ties the stories together; Eddie's wife-beating is mirrored by the beating Willie's seductress receives from her husband.
The characters are depicted neither as purely good or evil: for example, Rosie in "The Super" triumphs over the racist, abusive superintendent by stealing his money, having him framed for pedophilia, and driving him to suicide. Confinement is a prominent theme; Eisner chooses perspectives through which the reader views the characters framed by doorways, window frames, or sheets of rain. Frimme Hersh seeks freedom from oppressive Eastern European antisemitism; there is a feeling of elation for characters in the final story as they find their way out of the tenement's, and the city's, confinement.
According to academic Derek Royal, Jewish ethnicity is prominent throughout the stories; in "A Contract with God" and "Cookalein", religious and cultural Jewish symbolry are prominent, though in the middle two stories, there is little outward evidence of the characters' Jewishness. The two outer stories further emphasize Jewish identity with the extra-urban portions of their settings—the rural Russian origin of the religious Hersh in "Contract", and the Catskill mountains in "Cookalein", a retreat commonly associated with Jews in the 20th century. Eisner deals with representing Jewish identity through community. He juxtaposes individual stories and individual characters, who have different experiences which may be incompatible with one another; this confounds any single definition of "Jewishness", though there is a communal sense that binds these characters and their Jewishness together. Royal argues that Eisner shows the unresolved nature of American identity, in which ethnicities are conflicted between cultural assimilation and their ethnic associations. As the book progresses, the characters move from overt Jewishness to greater levels of assimilation, presented as an ambivalent change that has costs of its own.
Royal argued that the book was not only important to comics studies, but also to the study of Jewish and ethnic American literature. Much like short story cycles common to contemporary Jewish prose, in which stories can stand alone, but complement each other when read as a loosely integrated package, Royal wrote that Contract could be better described as a "graphic cycle" rather than a "graphic novel". He wrote that such cycles, as well as Eisner's, emphasized a heterogeneous multiplicity of perspectives, as "o American ethnic literature can ever be defined monolithically".
Art critic Peter Schjeldahl saw the "over-the-topness" endemic to American comics, and Eisner's work, as "ill-suited to serious subjects, especially those that incorporate authentic social history". The work has been criticized for its use of stereotypical imagery; writer Jeremy Dauber countered that these images reflect Eisner's own memories of his youth and the strictures that Jewish people felt in the tenements. Others said caricaturized character designs conflicted with the otherwise realism of the stories; the appropriateness of the style was defended by others, such as Dennis O'Neil, who said that they better reflect the impressionistic way a child remembers the past.
The concept of a contract or covenant with God is fundamental to the Jewish religion. The idea that God must uphold his end of the first commandment has been a subject of works such as Elie Wiesel's play The Trial of God (1979), made in response to the atrocities Wiesel witnessed at Auschwitz. To art historian Matthew Baigell, Hershe's angst regarding his relationship with God is a modern response to the questions of Hillel the Elder's quoted in the Pirkei Avot: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?" Literary scholar Susanne Klingenstein found Hersh's character unrealistic from the view of Jewish scholarship. She wrote that "the suffering of the righteous" is "one of the greatest problems in Jewish thought", and that a character as devoutly religious as Hersh would not have struggled with what she saw as elementary Jewish teaching.
