The natural bernard malamud pdf download

With mythic and historic events entwined in an exaggerated present, the novel recreates the strange eternal temporal suggestiveness of a dream. If the overall structure of the novel resembles that of a dream, the individual parts also have an illusory quality. Illusions recur fitfully throughout the book, constantly blurring the lines, as in Macbeth, between reality and fantasy, myth and history. In The Natural, dreams function as a metadiegetic narrative, offering stories within stories, maintaining a tension between realism and fable where insatiable desires, the materials of the unconscious, are constantly erupting into life.

Roy Hobbs: would-be hero and everyday schmuck Malamud constructs a dreamscape populated with outlandish characters that are larger than life yet all too human in their frailties and desires. As we have already seen, he might have added, amongst others, Odysseus, Perceval, Macbeth and, as Gealy argues, the schlemiel-schlemazel character that Malamud would develop in his later novels. It is now well established that there can be no psychoanalyzing of characters in a novel which exist only as text, or the mind of the novelist to which there is no access.

Our roving Roy of the Knights embodies the contradictions we might feel about other people and ourselves. We want and believe them to be perfect but delight in their frailties. The pedestal is erected tall, so much the better to facilitate a fall from grace. As much schadenfreude as Freud, we revel in the misfortune of others blessed with more talent than ourselves. Roy as a modern day sports star Malamud paints Roy as a flawed, perhaps even an empty, hero as he pursues his sporting goals at the expense of relationships with others or taking responsibility for himself.

With his later works in mind, it seems that Malamud created Roy as an object lesson in the pitfalls of infantile irresponsibility with an interest only in trivial pursuits. In this sense, The Natural is a direct successor to Tom Brown for its moralistic themes of spiritual development as much as for the sport. As Frank LeBlanc suggests, The Natural is more parable than myth, the lesson being that, to be successful, discipline is needed alongside talent.

Contrary to these readings, Roy might also be seen as the very epitome of the modern sports star. What other goal is a player meant to have but to want to be the very best there ever was? Arguably, it is the most glorious and honest goal there can possibly be in the sporting world. But Roy, going against the grain of popular wisdom that hero status can only ever be conferred from without, loudly announces it for himself.

Roy wants to be a hero for himself and himself alone. Yet, occasionally the mask slips and we see beyond the bland banality to a more profound truth. We consider Roy to be far too full of himself, but he is simply giving voice to the beliefs we all have about ourselves, but have learnt to suppress out of fear of ridicule.

That part of our psychic constitution is not called the ideal ego for nothing as we attempt to recuperate a sense of infantile omniscience through our dreams and fantasies. For Freud, a dream was not so much one of wish fulfilment but of the fantasy of a fulfilled desire.

And it is to the end that I now turn. The Natural, corruption and Macbeth In a novel that has revealed a multitude of fictional and historical allusions, it may seem redundant to infer more than those already well documented in the critical literature. Like Macbeth the play, The Natural teeters perilously at all times on the ridge between the real and the unreal, the familiar and the alien, with the uncanny return of characters and events and the ambiguous distinctions between myth and history.

And, like Macbeth, Roy, having fallen in lust with Memo, is fatally tempted by a woman with greater ambition than his own. It is not a myth unique to America; it pervades the whole of Western culture. First, however, it is worth recalling how the game-fixing scenario plays out in The Natural.

Roy, suffering from a terrible bellyache after encouragement by the object of his sexual desire, Memo, to gorge himself the night before the big game, is informed by doctors that the pennant-deciding match must be his last due to a damaged heart. Now financially more vulnerable than ever, Roy is approached first by Memo and later by corrupt club owner The Judge, who, working with Gus Sands, the Supreme Bookie, wants Roy to fix the upcoming pennant-deciding game. He agrees to help fix the game as he believes the money he is promised will help set him up in business so he can then marry Memo, who has, in fact, been grooming him all along at the behest of the corrupt partnership.

Roy, taken in by her deception, and feeling weak from his illness, succumbs to the temptation to play badly in order to ensure that his team, the Knights, lose the game so The Judge and Gus can make corrupt money on the betting markets. Roy is torn between the need for money, his lust for Memo, and his loyalty to Pop Fisher.

Shocked by what he has done, Roy vows to win the game, but he finds his Excalibur, his Wonderboy, split, as he has been, in two. Forced to use a normal bat, he tries to win the game but, without his magic weapon, he flails and misses, striking out to the new pretender, Youngberry. The Knights and Pop lose and the Judge and Gus win their crooked bet. Full of remorse for yielding to corruption, Roy angrily rejects the bribe.

The novel contributes to an understanding of corruption through a technique that melds comedy and tragedy with fantasy and reality. Or, to be more accurate, a fixed game occupies a position of epistemological uncertainty between the real and the fake.

Corruption never reveals itself directly, but only as a phantom sense of suspicion and unease that something is not quite right — an unexpectedly poor pitch or miss here, a dropped catch there.

Match-fixing is often only glimpsed through the oblique means of gossip, hearsay, and rumors; ghosts are only caught in the corner of an eye; dreams escape the waking mind just before they can be remembered; and language slips away at the moment of definition. Malamud conveys the sense that we are looking at a game that is slightly off kilter, but does so by distorting the language of the game.

Using the technique of an omniscient narrator, alongside an ironic stance to the narration itself, Malamud allows the reader to see the corrupt core of sport while showing how it is covered up and presented to the public as the real thing. From the perspective of the fan, the corruption is disguised as they place their bets and cheer on their team, accepting the anguish of defeat as the inevitable result of sport in which there must be a loser as well as a winner. What we see is the darkest of nightmares, in which reality is indistinguishable from the faked — surely a parable for our times if ever there was one.

Roy, as Everyman, is caught up in this web of deceit and, suddenly, his protestations to be the hero to anyone except himself seem all the more preposterous.

The very concept of the hero, or an American dreamer, or a dreamer anywhere of any kind, is shown to be a fantasy created to maintain the fiction of the game of sport and of life as an honest endeavor in which we can all be winners. When he resurfaces from where?

In truth, he has been trapped in their dream from the outset. As the fixed game proceeds, the web gathers round Roy and it becomes clear to him that he is caught in the nightmare of The Judge and Gus, but also hooked into the noble dream of Pop Fisher, who desperately wants to win the pennant just the once in his lifetime. For Roy, the epistemological and ontological tension is unbearable.

Torn between nightmare and dream, he literally does not know what to do. In rage at the recognition that his dream is finally broken, he tries to silence his externalized superego by smashing foul balls at him in a final act of futile resistance.

And yet, there is a sense that Roy, while he remained childlike and infantile, dreaming only of being the best, had his chance to break the chains in which he became trapped. The Natural is all these things and more. In this article I have attempted to add to the commentary on The Natural that focuses on the myths, symbols, allegories, and historical antecedents, and to reclaim it for its sporting context and as a novel that is, at its heart, about baseball, the place of sport in society, and a contemporary critique of our precarious times.

Perhaps, above all, the novel can reveal something of ourselves as 21st century readers. What more are we expected to aspire to but to be the hero in our own life, to throw off the mantle of false modesty and to embrace our ideal ego, and reclaim for ourselves our dreams and fantasies? The same goes for all of us: simply to be the best we can be.

New York: Columbia University Press, Detweiler, Robert. Field, Joyce W. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Dead Dodo Vintage. Some of the techniques listed in The Natural may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.

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