The Natural Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

This whole novel can be read as allegory that uses baseball to tell a deeper universal story: heroic figure seeks his destiny and falls short due to his own failings. The novel is loaded with symbo...

First, T.S. Eliot. Eliot's super-famous 1922 poem "The Waste Land" describes, well, a waste land. Here, everything's dried up, no water. It's a spiritual, cultural, and physical wasteland, kind of...

You get the idea. This is a big story, about much more than baseball. Some literary critics thought that baseball was too trivial a subject to carry the weight of all of Malamud's added myth and sy...

Roy practically loses his marbles in the novel, so maybe that's where all this imagery of loose spherical objects comes from. You might start to think you need to go to the eye doctor as you read a...

The women in Roy's life are a strange lot. First there's Harriet Bird, who tries to murder him. Then there's Memo, who turns out to be a gold-digging backstabber. And finally, there's Iris, whose r...

They're not just for country songs anymore but let's get in the mood with the best train song ever. We'll give you a minute.Trains in the novel, cheesy at it sounds, can represent the journey of li...

Wonderboy has a mythic backstory. Roy made it from wood from the heart of a tree that was struck by lightning. It glows so blindingly white that pitchers complain about it. It's like magic:Wonderbo...

Roy Hobbs is always hungry. Like insatiably hungry. The guy's a regular Joey Chestnut. Malamud takes every opportunity to show us that his appetite for food is just a stand in for other hungers. [R...

Everyone likes birds. They're cute, they can fly, they sing real pretty, they help you get ready for the Prince's ball. What's not to love? Well, in The Natural, just about everything. Maybe Malamu...

Here's our first look at the Knights' ballpark:Removing his cap, Pop rubbed his bald head with his bandaged fingers. "It's been a blasted dry season. No rains at all. The grass is worn scabby in th...

There's physical illness that afflicts several of the characters, and the author uses it to convey a sense of psychological trouble. For example, Pop has a case of athlete's foot of the hands (???)...