How Bernard Malamuds, the Natural, Uses Style to Potray Historical Events in His Era

Each writer is influenced in many different ways, but, in general, most of their inspiration comes from those events occurring within the era they are living in. They also use various different techniques or styles to portray those events in their writings. Bernard Malamud wrote a novel, published in 1952, called The Natural. This novel used numerous different stylistics elements to reveal the impact sports had in the late 1940s.

One central stylistic element used, in The Natural, to show the impact of sports, in the late 1940s, was structure. The sequencing of the novel is immensely different from the majority of novels. It begins with Roy Hobbs (the main character), at nineteen years of age, when he is aspiring to become a famous baseball player. Almost everyone thinks that he is too young to become a ball player except for one man, Sam Simpson. He became Roy Hobbs’s manager and was taking him too tryout for the Chicago cubs. Ever since he seen him play in high school he believed he had what it took to make it. The ones that didn’t believe in Roy Hobbs Sam Simpson would tell them, “ Well, like I said, he’s young, but he certainly mowed them down in the Northwest High School league last year” (Malamud 14). But, Sam Simpson is killed later on in that chapter, on the way to Roy Hobbs's tryout. No one else is willing to give him a change due to his age, despite his

great high school record for through the most no hitters in high school baseball history.

Then, in the next chapter, Batter Up! Part I, it skips to fifteen years later when he gets his first chance to become a baseball player. In the beginning Pop Fisher, manager of the New York knights, did not want to sign him due to his age. Fisher is heard telling him, “ Thirty-four --Holy Jupiter, mister, you belong in an old man’s home, not baseball” (42). But this did not matter because Judge, the owner, had already signed him for a four year contract with the knights. Fisher wanted to contest the contract, yet had no one else to put in his place. So he decided to give him a chance. Finally, the novel reaches the ending of his career, when the Knights are at their peek. Roy Hobbs gets horribly ill and is incapable of playing. Roy Hobbs got an early start in baseball and was very well at it. Regardless of that he still did not make it to organized baseball until his mid-thirties, even then they believed he was too old. With the unique way this novel is sequenced it allows us to envision how difficult it was to become a baseball “star” in the late 1940s. This was when baseball was considered not just a sport but like a religion.

Character development is also a key element in this novel. You see Roy Hobbs go from a person no one knows, to a star, to a ‘has been.’ In the beginning of his career he encountered a well-known ball player, by the name of Whammer. Though he was not in

the peek of his career he was still considered a great baseball player. His character was a resemblance of Babe Ruth in the late 1940s, who was also referred

to as ‘The Whammer.’ Babe