Critical Evaluation
The Natural is a fable in which the fortunes of its hero parallel those of Parzival, the medieval knight. Bernard Malamud uses myth and American culture’s heroic ritual to explore the psychology of American life. The novel is enriched by drawing on events out of baseball lore and legend, such as the 1949 hotel-room shooting of Philadelphia Phillies infielder Eddie Waitkus by a crazed woman sports fan, the infamous game-fixing scandal of 1919, the many achievements of Babe Ruth, and the fate of Casey at the bat.
Roy Hobbs is a knight and a fool. An aging rookie who comes to play for the hapless New York Knights, he is also a natural baseball player with outstanding talent. After he became a knight, Parzival was given the quest of finding and healing the Fisher King of the Wasteland. He failed because he did not ask, rather than answer, the right question. Like Parzival, Roy fails because of his inability to answer Harriet Bird’s question about what he hopes to accomplish in his career. His reply is limited and selfish: to be the best there ever was in the game. After Harriet gives him a second chance and he fails again, she discharges a silver bullet into him. It is not enough for the hero to have talent; he must have a purpose in life. Parzival and Roy are heroes who are too wrapped up in their self-image to recognize the responsibility that comes with their great talent.
After fifteen years, Roy returns to baseball, this time, like Babe Ruth, as a home-run hitter rather than a pitcher. He joins the Knights, a team so bad that even its field, like the Wasteland, suffers from drought. The team’s manager, Pop Fisher, the Fisher King, has spent a career without winning a pennant. In the medieval myth the Wasteland cannot become fertile until the Fisher King is replaced by the young, innocent hero. In The Natural, Roy is the mythic hero who can undo the bad luck of his spiritual father, Pop Fisher, and bring relief to the drought. When Roy starts hitting, the team begins winning, torrential rains come down, and the field turns green.
As fertility god, Roy has to choose the proper woman to be his companion. Like other Malamud heroes, he has a choice between a woman who represents life-giving fertility and one whose power lies in her seductive vanity. Iris Lemon, named for a fruit and a flower, is the woman Roy should choose. Roy, however, is attracted to Memo Paris, whose name suggests someone who uses memory rather than imagination and who uses her powers to destroy, as Paris did Achilles, the men in her life. Her condition is symbolized by her sick breast, a sign that she is incapable of either nurturing the hero or having her own children.
Iris, on the other hand, is connected with Roy’s first selfless act. Roy promises to hit a home run for an injured boy, a boy who has given up struggling for his life (the incident is taken from the career of Ruth). Roy understands for the first time that as a hero he has responsibility for other human beings. When Iris stands up in the crowd for him, he responds by hitting a home run. Iris urges upon Roy the responsibility inherent in being a hero. A hero must become a moral example for ordinary people, especially for children.
Later, Iris tries to explain to Roy the sacrifice of ego that is required of a hero. The hero is not for himself, but for others....
(This entire section contains 891 words.)
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Iris explains to Roy the theory that every person has two lives: One life teaches through experience how to live, and the other life is the life lived out of that knowledge. The life that teaches is always built out of suffering and sacrifice so that the life that is lived can move toward happiness by choosing the right things.
Iris can bring Roy to that life only by freeing him from his fear of mortality. She must make him see that playing baseball with the aim of making himself immortal by setting records is immoral, self-centered, and counterproductive. Roy is not mature enough, however, to accept her wisdom. Malamud believes that redemption lies in the hero’s understanding of his own past and his ability to transcend it. Roy’s inability to do this is the basis of his failure. A woman laments at the end of the novel, “He coulda been a king.” Roy is left only with his self-hatred. As the ballplayer tells himself in the final page, “I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again.”
Roy’s dismal failure makes The Natural a clear introduction to the morality that informs Malamud’s later work. Malamud’s moral understanding is based upon his insistence that submission to suffering is the only avenue of redemption. Readers see in Roy their own limitations and the possibility that exists to overcome those limitations. Malamud’s qualified affirmation comes out of a belief in the resources of the human spirit, with an understanding of the social and economic pressures that can suffocate it. In its use of myth, moral, and symbol, The Natural is a necessary text for reading Malamud’s subsequent fiction.