fantasies, like Kugelmass’s yearning for a beautiful companion and Emma Bovary’s dream of an acting career and fame. However, Allen pushes this idea further as Kugelmass's fantasy evolves into a literal, fantastical journey into another realm.

Within the narrative, Kugelmass is fatigued and seeks an escape from his monotonous, ordinary life. He wishes to break away from the reality of his awkward wife, Daphne, and pursue an affair. He isn't in search of a typical fling or a "chippie on the side," as his wife describes; he longs for excitement, tenderness, and glamour. He fantasizes about "exchanging coy glances over red wine and candlelight." He turns to Persky for help, and despite evident signs that things might go wrong (the unsuccessful magician resides in a run-down apartment and uses a shabby Chinese cabinet as his transporter), he decides to suspend his disbelief and hope for the best. Kugelmass, eager to escape his reality, trusts that Persky knows what he’s doing. His fantasy becomes reality when he is transported into the world of Flaubert’s novel and begins an affair with Emma Bovary. However, Kugelmass quickly realizes that living out one’s fantasy involves many risks. Once again, he seeks to escape—this time from his fantasy-turned-reality—considering either suicide or fleeing to Europe. He feels a sense of relief when Emma is finally sent back to Yonville. The story depicts art as a means of escaping real life, with its dull and uninspiring people and situations. Yet, even though this escape is enticing, it remains an illusion, and by nature, illusions are never what they appear to be.

"The Kugelmass Episode" is notably a tale centered around a New York Jew, with Allen incorporating numerous details to emphasize the Jewish identity of his main characters. Kugelmass is a professor at the City College of New York. The name "Kugel" in the protagonist's title alludes to a traditional sweet noodle dish often enjoyed during Passover. Indeed, all the "real" characters in the narrative are Jewish—Kugelmass, Daphne, Dr. Mandel, Persky, and even Kugelmass’s envious colleague, Fivish Kopkind. Allen's characters display stereotypical Jewish attributes, such as Kugelmass’s anxiety and financial worries and Persky’s pessimistic outlook.

The story weaves in elements of Jewish humor, portraying the protagonist as a schlemiel, or clumsy individual, and uses exaggeration for comedic purposes. For example, Kugelmass remarks that Emma’s hotel bill "reads like the defense budget." It also explores the stresses of city living. While Allen satirizes Jewish culture, dialogue, and behaviors, he does so gently. His characters are quirky yet endearing, and their use of everyday speech in serious moments is arguably the most amusing part of the story.

‘‘The Kugelmass Episode’’ offers a humorous critique of the entertainment industry, particularly through its exaggerated portrayals of Persky the Great and Emma Bovary. Despite his failures, Persky continues to pursue his entertainment career, constantly hustling to make a living. He tells Kugelmass that he built his magical cabinet for a performance with the Knights of Pythias, a gig that ultimately "fell through." Now, he plans to capitalize on Kugelmass with his invention. When Emma arrives in New York, she becomes a caricature of a fame-hungry actress. She dreams of dining at Elaine’s, a well-known New York restaurant famous for its Italian-Jewish comfort food and celebrity clientele (and she wants to be among them). Convinced that acting is easy, she fantasizes about being trained by the famous Strasberg to win an Oscar. These characters emphasize the most superficial elements of the entertainment world, where the emphasis is not on artistic value but on wealth and celebrity status.

Like the Flaubert novel whose main character it appropriates, “The Kugelmass Episode” examines the futility of the quest for personal happiness. Although it is cast in a comic key, Woody Allen’s story, like Madame Bovary, is organized around a logic of disillusionment. Each stage of transcendence is a disappointment, and the more that Kugelmass, who has already been through two marriages at the outset of the story, reaches for something exotic that is beyond his grasp, the more miserable he becomes. It is appropriate that he is last seen hounded by the verb tener, a graphic reminder of the elusiveness of the heart’s desire: People cannot have what they want and do not want what they have.

Allen is best known for his achievements in film—as a prolific director, writer, and performer. Many of his cinematic works explore the complex relationship between art and life by being playfully metafictional; when characters mug to the camera or are themselves artists, the medium becomes aware of itself. “The Kugelmass Episode” is a similar fiction about fiction. Its interaction between “real” and invented characters anticipates the premise of Allen’s film The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in which a film character walks off the screen and into a romance with a woman in the audience.

As a professor of humanities, Kugelmass is a professional reader of literature. Like Flaubert’s Emma, whose addiction to extravagant love stories ultimately leads to her depression and suicide, Kugelmass is more stimulated by literary images than by the people and situations he encounters outside books. The simple diagnosis of his skeptical psychotherapist, Dr. Mandel, is that he is “so unrealistic.” Kugelmass is unable to reconcile the realities of his ordinary existence with the enchanting plots and persons he has encountered in his reading. Neither Flo, his first wife, nor Daphne, his second, could possibly be more exciting than Sister Carrie, Hester Prynne, Ophelia, or Temple Drake. Literature has spoiled him for life.

Allen assumes that his readers will catch these and other literary allusions, that his readers, like Kugelmass, are intimately acquainted with the most prominent works of Western literature and will pride themselves on their ability to follow the learned references, but, even more so, on their privileged detachment from the pathetic professor in the story. They may share his enthusiasm for books, but they have a redeeming awareness that undercuts the kind of uncritical absorption that undoes both Emma and Kugelmass—at least, such an awareness is assumed by Allen’s mocking text.

Even after discarding Emma, Kugelmass has not learned his lesson. He is soon lusting after another literary figure and deprecating his life outside of books. It is a futile, destructive cycle of desire and deceit, one that the story’s conclusion suggests must be broken: The eternal quest for happiness yields only eternal dissatisfaction. Persky’s extraordinary machine is destroyed, and the wizard himself dies. As the story approaches its final words, abjuring its own rough magic, it seems to be endorsing Dr. Mandel’s insistence on confronting the ordinary and coming to terms with it. The story does so, ironically, through Allen’s farfetched fictional contrivance.