A Baseball (Anti-)Hero in the Waste Land: Exploring Mythical Uncertainties in Bernard Malamud’s 'The Natural'

Abstract

Most critics of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (1952) have focused their analysis of the novel on probing the obvious mythical allusions in the text that combine Arthurian mythology and baseball folklore. More recent discussions, however, have raised the issue of the novel’s symbolic ambiguity which for so long has vexed Malamud scholars. As a response to this debate, the aim of this study is to address such indeterminacy by revisiting and bringing up to date a myth-critical interpretation on the novel, exploring how the mythical artifacts in Malamud’s text construe mechanisms of uncertainty and ambivalence that express an unsettling vision of post-war American society, which in turn deserves renewed critical attention.

Keywords

• bernard malamud
• the natural
• myth-criticism
• arthurian mythology
• baseball
• sports literature
• grail myth