Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
Malamud chose to take this character with all his hopes and dreams and destroy him totally. Why? What message does that send? Why did Malamud want to use baseball, a game of optimism and there's-always-tomorrow and wait-till-next-year to be so unbearably pessimistic?
|
He did go to extraordinary lengths to fix the game against Roy. It felt contrived - sort of
Deus ex machina, in reverse.
I don’t have any of my own insights as to why. But according to this Wiki article,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Natural, Malamud was drawing on several sources of mythology. So apparently the soul crushing, utterly destroying fate of Roy mirrored that of other mortals battling fate.